Peter Frase

A month or two ago, Bhaskar Sunkara came to me with the idea that we could, on a short deadline, turn our long-running discussions about the future of progressive politics in the United States into a "[Piven-Cloward plan](http://www.thenation.com/article/weight-poor-strategy-end-poverty) for the 21st century" for the cover of *In These Times* magazine. This was, of course, an insane proposal, combining the intellectual hubris of a mid-20th century French philosopher and the slapdash work ethic of an undergraduate pulling an all nighter. But I've learned by now not to doubt Bhaskar's [crazy schemes](http://www.jacobinmag.com), so naturally I signed on.

You can read the resulting product [here](http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/13998/the_welfare_state_of_america/#.UIVaggremjs.facebook), and Francis Fox Piven herself also weighs in with [an editorial](http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/14035/for_the_welfare_of_all) in the issue. I don't know whether we accomplished our grandiose aims, but I'm happy we at least made a case for something that's long been discussed on the left, and which doesn't get nearly enough attention: the need to shift responsibility for social policy from states and localities to the federal government.

In the essay, we make our case primarily on fiscal grounds, pointing out that the limited ability of sub-national governments to run deficits almost inevitably leads to a politics of austerity. But there's another aspect to this that we didn't really talk about, which is the regional structure of American politics. Reactionary approaches to the welfare state are particularly characteristic of the south, both its culture and its political economy. Federalizing social policy is therefore both an act of solidarity with the working class of that region, and a move toward completing the class project of the civil war.

As we note in the essay, Republicans---Romney and Ryan included---favor the inverse of our strategy, and advocate devolving social policy to the states. This has broadly negative consequences for the beneficiaries of such policies, but it has particularly bad implications for the residents of conservative states. Those states, as Jonathan Cohn explains [in *The New Republic*](http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/magazine/108185/blue-states-are-scandinavia-red-states-are-guatemala), are markedly stingier about social welfare spending. They also happen to be, by and large, the states with the most poor people. (This is, incidentally, what gives rise to "What's the Matter With Kansas"-style fallacies about poor people voting against their economic interests, due to the phenomenon of rich people living in poor states [being more strongly Republican](http://www.amazon.com/Red-State-Blue-Rich-Poor/dp/069113927X).)

This bifurcation of state-level social policy, which Cohn glosses as "Blue States are from Scandinavia, Red States are from Guatemala", also has a strongly regional pattern. Consider the following image, from the sidebar to Cohn's article:

The division between our local Scandinavias and Guatemalas tracks a very old north-south division in American politics, which is where the civil war comes in. Michael Lind recently [argued at Salon.com](http://www.salon.com/2012/10/10/slave_states_vs_free_states_2012/) that:

> The core of today’s Democratic Party consists of the states of New England and the Great Lakes/Mid-Atlantic region that were the heart of the Union effort during the Civil War. The core of today’s Republican Party consists of the states that seceded from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America.

Lind goes on to argue that:

> Notwithstanding slavery, segregation and today’s covert racism, the Southern system has always been based on economics, not race. Its rulers have always seen the comparative advantage of the South as arising from the South’s character as a low-wage, low-tax, low-regulation site in the U.S. and world economy. The Southern strategy of attracting foreign investment from New York, London and other centers of capital depends on having a local Southern workforce that is forced to work at low wages by the absence of bargaining power.

Centralizing welfare policy is therefore a way of avoiding a situation that pits the residents of the liberal states against an immiserated workforce in the south. This is an act of principled solidarity---a refusal to simply leave southern workers to deal with their conservative elites on their own---but also a pragmatic necessity. We may not yet be able to demand a global social democracy, but we can at least avoid an invidious race to the bottom with our fellow Americans.

Our essay concludes by envisioning the welfare state as a foundation for freedom:

> Freedom to give their children an education without rival. Freedom from poverty, hunger and homelessness. Freedom to grow into old age with pensions, Social Security, and affordable and accessible healthcare. Freedom to leave an exploitative work environment and find another job. Freedom to organize with fellow workers for redress.

The decommodification of labor that's entailed by egalitarian social policy is a partial emancipation from the [unfreedom of the workplace](http://crookedtimber.org/2012/07/01/let-it-bleed-libertarianism-and-the-workplace/). The stakes in this debate are therefore much higher than simply the existence of a "safety net" or a rudimentary social wage. It's about giving workers the confidence and the material security necessary to make bolder demands for social change.

You sometimes see Trotskyist sectarians [using the slogan](http://www.icl-fi.org/print/english/wv/980/civilwar.html) "Finish the Civil War! Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!" But before we get around to the revolution bit, just getting a robust national-level welfare state would in itself be a big step toward the completion of the emancipatory project.

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.*

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).

Rick Perlstein's recent *Rolling Stone* [column](http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/why-obama-needs-to-change-to-win-20120222) performs what is now a routine left-liberal critique of Obama: by failing to articulate an ideology and differentiate himself from Republicans, the President has allowed Republicans to redefine mainstream political debate ever farther to the right. This argument has certain charms, but I couldn't help but notice the way Perlstein himself inadvertently enacts the same error he ascribes to Obama, and "ratifies his opponent's reality, by folding it into his original negotiating position." In the course of refuting various Reagan-era calumnies against Jimmy Carter, Perlstein informs us that:

> What's more, to arrest the economy's slide, Jimmy Carter did something rather heroic and self-sacrificing, well summarized [here](http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-carterreagan.htm): He appointed Paul Volcker as Federal Reserve chairman with a mandate to squeeze the money supply, which induced the recession that helped defeat Carter – as Carter knew it might – but which also slayed the inflation dragon and, by 1983-84, long after Carter had lost to Reagan, saved the economy.

This has settled in as the preferred narrative of the "Volcker shock" across the mainstream political spectrum, with Carter and Volcker as the self-sacrificing heroes who forced unpleasant but life-saving medicine down the throat of an unruly nation. We are to imagine them wistfully reading Brecht's ["To Posterity"](http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/to-posterity/) as they sacrifice their political reputations on the altar of contractionary monetary policy; do not judge them too harshly.

Not to worry, for judgment has been remarkably generous, even among liberals. It falls to radical malcontents like [Doug Henwood](http://lbo-news.com/2011/12/13/the-fed-and-the-class-struggle/) and David Harvey to tell a different story. If the heroic mythology of Volcker's recession is reminiscent of the self-congratulatory rhetoric of the contemporary pro-austerity faction, this is no coincidence. In the radical account, the Volcker shock is the beginning of the long era of [opportunistic disinflation](http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2010/07/22/197970/opportunistic-disinflation/), in which wage and employment gains may never be tolerated if they come at the expense of a little inflation. Here is how Harvey describes the opening salvo:

> In October 1979 Paul Volcker, chairman of the US Federal Reserve Bank under President Carter, engineered a draconian shift in US monetary policy.¹⁸ The long-standing commitment in the US liberal democratic state to the principles of the New Deal, which meant broadly Keynesian fiscal and monetary policies with full employment as the key objective, was abandoned in favour of a policy designed to quell inflation no matter what the consequences might be for employment. The real rate of interest, which had often been negative during the double-digit inflationary surge of the 1970s, was rendered positive by fiat of the Federal Reserve (Figure 1.5). The nominal rate of interest was raised overnight and, after a few ups and downs, by July 1981 stood close to 20 per cent. Thus began ‘a long deep recession that would empty factories and break unions in the US and drive debtor countries to the brink of insolvency, beginning the long era of structural adjustment’.¹⁹ This, Volcker argued, was the only way out of the grumbling crisis of stagflation that had characterized the US and much of the global economy throughout the 1970s.

This was all understood at the time. Here is the *New York Times* on December 31, 1981:

> The outlook for inflation, said Richard G. Lipsey, of Queens University in Ontario, "turns on the determination of wage increases," not supply-side tax cuts or quick changes in inflationary expectations. For Mr. Lipsey, this means that the fight against inflation requires accepting the pain of high unemployment and a sluggish economy.

> Mr. Volcker said he was optimistic. "The picture looks a little better to me," he said this week after leading a panel discussion at the social science convention. But, he added with his usual caution, "the evidence is not clear yet."

> "The problem," Mr. Volcker said, "is not only making gains at a high cost during a recession, but also keeping them when the recovery begins."

> "I'm agnostic," said Charles L. Schultze, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Carter Administration. "I don't know. We will get the special ones, like autos, but I don't know the extent to which they will slop over into the rest of the economy."

Volcker was trying to accomplish the same thing that Ronald Reagan was trying to do when he smashed the air traffic controllers' union: weaken labor. [Here](http://books.google.com/books?id=c7b-lYM_-TcC&lpg=PA82&ots=N-wyRBuypt&dq=feldstein%20american%20economic%20policy%20in%20the%201980s&pg=PA162#v=onepage&q&f=false), Volcker offers that:

> the single most important action of the [Reagan] administration in helping the anti-inflation fight was defeating the air traffic controllers' strike. He thought that this action had had a rather profound, and, from his standpoint, constructive effect on the climate of labor-management relations, even though it had not been a wage issue at the time.

And yet it's hard to imagine a writer like Rick Perlstein calling Reagan's attack on PATCO "courageous".

But perhaps the neglect of the Volcker regime's class nature reflects a deeper shortcoming in liberal politics. The stagflation that Carter faced was a more intractable problem than the demand shortfall that confronts the American economy today, and it was far less susceptible to the traditional Keynesian remedies. When capital refuses to invest, and labor refuses to take no for an answer, then something has to give. The alternative to neoliberalism's assault on the working class was not simply a continuation of the Fordist golden age, but a more radical attack on the capitalist mode of production. Reflecting on the stagflation era in 1988, the socialist economist Diane Elson [remarks](http://newleftreview.org/?view=424):

> Conventional Keynesian fiscal and monetary remedies are unable to deal with a situation in which prices and wages are rising while output and employment are falling. This has opened the way for ‘monetarist’ policies to confront the problem by a combination of deflation and attempts to make markets more ‘competitive’, in the sense of more like the markets of Walrasian and Austrian theory, with prices falling as demand falls. Such policies impose enormous costs in terms of unemployment and wasted resources, and are ultimately self-defeating. Most markets fail to behave like those in Walrasian and Austrian theory not for lack of competition, but precisely because of the existence of competition. An accessible exposition of this point is provided by Okun, who concludes: ‘ . . . the appropriate functioning of customer markets and career labour markets requires a marked departure from the price flexibility of the competitive model. Customers and suppliers, employees and firms develop methods of reducing price variation that help to perpetuate relations and minimize transaction costs over the long run.’ [39] At the micro-level, there are good reasons for firms to raise wages and pass on increased costs in price increases while reducing output and employment. By doing so, they may be better able to maintain the co-operation and loyalty of their customers and workforce than by cutting wages and prices.

> The policy conclusion commonly drawn from this type of reasoning is the need for Keynesian monetary and fiscal policy to be supplemented by some kind of incomes policy which will restrain firms from raising wages, and thus make it possible for conventional Keynesian policies to maintain a higher level of demand without running into the problem of inflation. However, this penalizes households in relation to enterprises if there is no complementary mechanism restraining prices. Recognizing this, some advocates of incomes policies also advocate price controls. But if the process of setting prices is left in the hands of enterprises, there still remains a fundamental imbalance: households cannot monitor price formation in a way that enables them to enforce restraint on enterprises in the same way that enterprises can monitor wage formation and enforce a wage restraint programme upon workers. [40] Moreover, the vital knowledge of unit costs and profit margins remains in the hands of enterprises, and without this Price Commissions have no teeth, and the implementation of price guidelines cannot be effectively monitored. This imbalance could only be removed by socializing the price formation process, making it transparent to households by making information on unit costs and profit margins public. Capitalist enterprises will always resist this, because secrecy gives them a competitive advantage and private ownership implies the right to withhold information. State-owned enterprises will also resist such disclosure if they are enjoined to focus their efforts on maximizing their own surpluses, and to relate to other enterprises, and to households, primarily through the market. It is not surprising that price formation is such an explosive issue in the marketization of socialism.

Elson goes on to detail her radical solution, which includes free public services, an unconditional basic income, worker-managed public enterprises, and public accounting of prices and wages. Around the same time, others were experimenting with less ambitious---yet still extremely radical---solutions such as the [Rehn-Meidner plan](http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1093/is_n1_v41/ai_20485334/). Such far-reaching proposals may perhaps seem quaint now, and this kind of grand theorizing may indeed be ill-suited to the present moment. But that only underscores the difference between the crisis we face today and the one the capitalism faced around the 1970's. Today's crisis stems, ultimately, from labor's weakness, and its historically low share in total output; this is a problem that the ruling class could in principle solve, even if they choose not do so (whether for political reasons or merely out of ineptitude). The previous crisis was something else, the consequence of labor's *strength* and of capital's increasing inability to contain it.

Such crises represent social democracy's revolutionary limit, and hence conventional reformist liberalism has no good answers to them. At best, it finds itself in the position of William Greider, [mounting a defense of inflation](http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Secrets+of+the+Temple.-a06306539http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Secrets+of+the+Temple.-a06306539) as the friend of the debtor---a reasonable claim at moderate inflation rates, but more tenuous for the situation of the early '80s. Today, liberals and socialists can find themselves aligned in calling for aggressive fiscal policy to restore effective demand. But if they don't grapple with the historic impasse that the stagflation era represented, then liberals may well find themselves in the uncomfortable position of endorsing the Volcker shocks of the future.

I was surprised and pleased to see that Bhaskar had decided to put Shulamith Firestone's *The Dialectic of Sex* up [on the Jacobin blog](http://jacobinmag.com/blog/2012/02/the-dialectic-of-sex/), as it's one of my favorite pieces of Marxist-feminist writing. In spite of its occasional outlandishness, it does two things exceptionally well. The first is to extend Marxist analysis into the realm of sex and gender by simply taking Marx and Engels' own framework to its logical conclusion, which they themselves were too blinded by the patriarchal assumptions of their time to recognize. The second is to see modern technology as an indispensable element of women's liberation, going so far as to argue that "Until a certain level of evolution had been reached and technology had achieved its present sophistication, to question fundamental biological conditions was insanity."

My recent writing has, I think, created an impression in some people's minds that I'm reflexively pro-technology. I even jokingly refer to myself that way sometimes. It's true that I will sometimes treat a certain kind of technical change as an [unexamined premise](http://jacobinmag.com/winter-2012/four-futures/), and that I tend to be [skeptical of arguments](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/09/conservative-leftists-and-radical-dockworkers/) that are centered on the criticism of technology and its effect on labor. But it isn't so much that I think more technology is always good; I just think that arguments for or against certain technologies often begin by asking the wrong question.

Via Aaron Bady's indispensable [Sunday Reading](http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2012/02/11/sunday-reading-35/), I found [this post](http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2012/02/on-technology-and-classless-society.html) from Richard at the blog "The Existence Machine", which I hadn't previously known about. Richard quotes, and objects to, a passage from the journalist Paul Mason asserting---and attributing to Marx---the notion that a classless society "must be based on the most advanced technologies and organisational forms created by capitalism itself." His objection is that this naturalizes technology and prevents us from being critical of its effects and its sustainability. But that's not the only way to interpret that formulation, and I think it somewhat misconstrues what the argument is about. The question is not whether technology, or capitalist production methods, are good or bad. Technology mediates social relations, and it is those social relations that should be the object of critique.

It is possible, however, to interpret Mason as saying that "advanced technologies and organizational forms" have an existence independent of class relations. To get into the technical weeds for a moment, this way of thinking reflects a dualism between what Marxists call the "forces of production" and the "relations of production". The forces of production are the machines, factories, and techniques that make large scale industrial society possible, while the relations of production are the human inequalities between the mass of workers who have nothing to sell but their labor power, and the handful of bosses who control the means of production. Taken to its extreme, the forces-relations dualism implies that we can keep the economy pretty much the way it is now, but just change who's in charge of it through some combination of worker ownership and government planning. I find this to be inadequate---even if it's possible, it doesn't really address some of the worst aspects of life in a capitalist society. And in the past, I've critiqued both [market socialism](http://theactivist.org/blog/do-they-owe-us-a-living) and [pension fund socialism](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/03/capitalism-without-capitalists/) on this basis.

The forces-relations dualism can also lead to a crude kind of technological determinism, in which technological changes somehow automatically lead to social transformation when they become incompatible with capitalist social relations. That's how this passage from Marx's [1859 *Preface*](http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm) is sometimes read:

> In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. __At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution.__ The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.

The most famous modern version of technological-determinist Marxism is probably G.A. Cohen's [*Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence*](http://press.princeton.edu/titles/320.html). But while I think there's a grain of truth to this reading, pure technological determinism is untenable as social theory, and politically it leads either to quiescence or to something like [accelerationism](http://leniency.blogspot.com/2008/10/accelerationism.html). Indeed, part of my purpose in writing ["Four Futures"]((http://jacobinmag.com/winter-2012/four-futures/)) was to demonstrate how the same technical conditions could be made compatible with very different social relations.

Yet for all that, I find myself sympathetic to Mason's formulation: socialism "must be based on the most advanced technologies and organisational forms created by capitalism itself". That's not because I think it's possible to build a classless future while keeping the capitalist forces of production exactly as the are. It's because, on the contrary, I think that altering relations of production inevitably leads to transformations in the technologies of production. So my amended claim would be that the successor to capitalism must *begin from* the capitalist forces of production, but it will not leave them unchanged. There is a critique to be made of technology, but it's the one that comes from workers themselves, and it is enacted in the workplace and in the labor market. The answer to the dehumanizing qualities of technology under capitalism is to attack the inequalities of class power that make them possible.

A concrete example of what this means can be found in a recent [report](http://retailactionproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/FINAL_RAP.pdf) on retail work in New York City, which I heard about from [Nick Serpe](http://dissentmagazine.org/atw/author.php?id=75). Nick alerted me to the following passage:

> Surveyed workers reported __erratic scheduling that could change hourly, especially with the use of computerized or online scheduling systems that can track projected sales and adjust labor costs daily.__ A JC Penney worker stated, 'They switch the schedule around a lot and they expect that you look on the computer every half hour to know your schedule. They change my time and if you didn’t print your schedule that week as evidence of the change, they will disregard your complaint.' The practice of hour-to-hour scheduling adjustments means that workers expect to be nearly always on call.

This is a clear example of technology being used to intensify worker exploitation, in a way that makes it appear to be both a force and a relation of production. And here is where I would distinguish my perspective from technological utopianism, which Mr. Teacup [glosses](http://www.mrteacup.org/post/malfunction-in-the-cyborgologist-utopia.html) as "good things are technologically determined and bad things are socially determined." I reject this position because I reject the idea that technology can be separated from society in this way, which is just another version of the forces-relations dualism. I begin from the premise that technologies reflect, embody, and arise in the context of social relations, and can never be socially or politically neutral; the forces and relations of production dialectically determine one another.

So I accept that technology can have negative effects on labor, and the passage quoted above is a good example. But labor also affects technology---that is, the form that technological change takes is shaped by the strength and organization of workers. I usually avoid writing in a way that directly criticizes technology, not because I'm a techno-utopian, but because I'm more interested in approaching the dialectic of worker and machine from the other side. The trouble with writing critiques of technology is that it tends to lead into either outright Luddism, or else Frankfurt School-style cultural pessimism that's not clearly connected to any collective agent or political project. The most plausible answer to the negative consequences of technology for workers, I believe, is not to denounce the machines but to *strengthen labor* so that it is able to contest the path of technical development on more favorable terms.

Being subject of the whims of a scheduling computer that can shift your hours around at any moment is, to be sure, not a pleasant situation. And if approached from the standpoint of critiquing technology, it's tempting to view this as a testament to the hollow nature of "progress", proof that the development of better machines only allows workers to become more immiserated, precarious, and exploited. But I read this not so much as a story about technology, but a story about the noxious interaction between technology and a weak, underpaid labor force.

Consider that [most research](http://books.google.com/books/about/Working_in_a_24_7_economy.html?id=56gXBZzzY7AC) shows that workers prefer to work regular, standard hours rather than having rotating or off-hour schedules. Yet most do not make any more money than they would doing the same job in a standard 9 to 5, at least in the United States. This strongly suggests that workers are unable to resist the desire of employers to impose non-standard work schedules, or to demand higher wages in return for taking them. The technology described in the passage above intensifies this dynamic, but is not the primary cause of it. The technology wouldn't have such baleful effects if not for the weak bargaining position of the workers. What is at issue, to use [mainstream economics terms](http://www.nber.org/papers/w14809.pdf), is whether technological change tends to be labor-saving or labor-complementary.

What would happen if workers were in a better position to resist these kinds of crappy scheduling policies? Suppose, for example, that employers had to pay much higher wages for work outside of standard hours, for irregular schedules, and for last-minute re-schedulings. In the short run, this would increase the income of some workers, which is good. It would also make employers more reluctant to use employees in this manner, unless it made them enough money to pay the higher wages. But in the long run, it would create stronger incentives for employers to simply use fewer workers, perhaps by replacing their labor with machines. This might sound like a dystopian scenario in itself---we win higher wages, and the end result is that we just get replaced with robots! But the alternatives are, in my view, even worse.

There are two primary mechanisms by which capitalist enterprises make themselves more profitable. The first is to exploit their workers harder, by extending their hours or by paying them lower wages. The second is to produce the same amount of stuff with fewer workers, by adopting new production techniques and new technologies. (If you want the long technical explanation, these are what Marx calls the absolute and relative forms of surplus value, and the [relevant chapters](http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/) of *Capital* are roughly chapters 7 through 12.) Since the two ways of increasing profits are to some degree substitutes, closing off one avenue tends to push the capitalist in the direction of the other.

If the absolute exploitation of labor is not an option---because the workers, for whatever reasons, are capable of demanding high wages---then the incentive to innovate in labor-saving ways will increase. Indeed, some technologies that aren't economical in an environment of low wages will become so when wages are high. This is the main argument of [my post](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/07/cheap-labor-and-the-great-stagnation/) about the connection between low wages and technological stagnation. On the other hand, if labor-saving technological innovation isn't an option---whether because it's directly barred or because there's a [great stagnation](http://www.amazon.com/Great-Stagnation-Low-Hanging-Eventually-ebook/dp/B004H0M8QS) on---then employers will focus on exploiting their workforce ever more intensely.

The final possibility is that *both* strategies are closed off: workers are powerful enough to maintain high wages, and labor-saving innovation is either prohibited or impossible. The result will just be a stagnant, low-growth economy. Some might view this as the best case scenario, since it would heighten the contradictions and make calls for an alternative to capitalism more convincing. But the evidence suggests that economic stagnation is not conducive to building a powerful and successful Left---often it's quite the opposite, as [Doug Henwood](http://lbo-news.com/2010/05/17/recessions-better-for-right-than-left/) and [Duncan Foley](http://homepage.newschool.edu/~foleyd/NotesCrisisSocChange.pdf) have argued. So until it's possible to make a radical break with capitalism, even socialists need to make their peace with economic growth---the question is whether that growth happens primarily on the basis of hyper-exploiting labor, or is instead predicated on using it more efficiently.

It's this way of thinking, perhaps, that leads me to be occasionally sympathetic to the cluster of ideas some of us refer to as [left neoliberalism](http://crookedtimber.org/2011/07/18/the-limits-of-left-neo-liberalism/). To me, the core of left-neoliberalism (or [globalize-grow-give progressivism](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/08/redistribution-under-neoliberalism/)) is growth-maximizing deregulation plus redistribution, as an alternative to directly intervening in the labor market to assure broad-based high wages. Where I part company with this school of thought, however, is in my emphasis on the need to strengthen the overall bargaining power of labor. This doesn't need to be brought about entirely through labor *unions* of the traditional sort; as Chris Maisano [notes](http://jacobinmag.com/blog/2012/01/the-state-of-our-unions/), their prognosis remains rather grim, and they have major drawbacks as presently constituted. But it does imply the need for some combination of unions, state regulations, [
full employment](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/07/against-jobs-for-full-employment/), and [basic income](http://theactivist.org/blog/do-they-owe-us-a-living). Ultimately, of course, a powerful and confident working class will tend to provoke a crisis for [Kaleckian](http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/kalecki220510.html) reasons, but that is a development I would very much welcome.

I stress the importance of strengthening labor precisely because I'm not a techno-utopian. Technological change may be almost inevitable---and in any case, I think it's very desirable---but the form that change takes is very much a question of social relations. As the early Mario Tronti [had it](http://libcom.org/library/lenin-in-england-mario-tronti), "it is the specific, present, political situation of the working class that both necessitates and directs the given forms of capital's development."

I've spoken only about the relation between technology and labor. Equally important are the ways that technology intersects with the environment, and with everyday life outside of the workplace. But a fuller consideration of those issues will have to wait for a future post.

There's a good article in [LA Magazine](http://www.lamag.com/features/Story.aspx?ID=1568281) about UCLA parking theorist Donald Shoup. Shoup has made a name for himself (among urban planning nerds) by showing how urban land use practices systematically over-produce free and cheap parking, leading to all sorts of undesirable consequences for everyday life.

As Matt Yglesias [says](http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2011/12/29/la_magazine_profiles_donald_shoup.html), Shoup's views on parking can be reduced to two themes. First, "that governments should not force real estate developers, store owners, and other businessmen to build more parking than their own calculation of what the market balance of supply and demand is." This is just the straightforward point that the state shouldn't force the creation of things that have negative externalities and disproportionately benefit the already well-off. More interesting is the second theme, "that governments shouldn't underprice street parking in a way that leads to Soviet-style shortages of available spaces and elaborate rationing rules about how long you're allowed to stay in a given spot." Yglesias, and Shoup, portray their position as a free-market alternative to the evils of central planning, surely a canny move for liberal audiences. But there's something else going on here; consider this experiment in LA, as described in the LA Magazine article:

> This spring the DOT plans to introduce an $18.5 million smart wireless meter system based on Shoup’s theories. Called ExpressPark, the 6,000-meter array will be installed on downtown streets and lots, along with sensors buried in the pavement of every parking spot to detect the presence of cars and price accordingly, from as little as 50 cents an hour to $6. __Street parking, like pork bellies, will be open to market forces__. As blocks fill, prices will rise; when occupancy drops, so will rates. In an area like downtown, ideal for Shoup’s progressive pricing, __people will park based on how much they’re willing to pay versus how far they are willing to walk to a destination.__

There are two points I want to make about the two bolded phrases, one directed to my left and one to my right. (See? I'm an even-handed centrist.) To Leftists, this talk of subjecting parking to "market forces" sounds like the usual neo-liberal claptrap, in which public services are thrown open to private avarice. And it's understandable that we're all wary of talk of the market, which has become a kind of universal solvent for putative reformers looking to batter down the welfare state; as Tom Frank [remarks](http://politics.salon.com/2011/12/28/the_rise_of_utopian_market_populism/), faith in the market has a utopian fervor on the right, as the free play of capitalism is presented as the magical solution to all problems.

But rather than accept the ideological representation of The Market as all that is competitive and efficient and bounteous and true about capitalism, it's worth reflecting on just what the Leftist objections to the market traditionally were, and whether they fit the case described here. There are two that I think are most important. The first is a narrowly economic argument, to the effect that under the "anarchy" of capitalist competition, the pursuit of private profit leads to unjust and irrational results: luxury goods are produced while the poor starve, inventories pile up that no-one can afford to buy, factories lie idle while thousands are looking for work, the environment is despoiled, and so on. In Trotsky's [Transitional Program](http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/tp-text.htm ), there are repeated references to this kind of market anarchy, which will inevitably be superseded by a superior form of rational, conscious, worker-controlled planning. Indeed, says Trotsky, "The necessity of 'controlling' economy, of placing state 'guidance' over industry and of 'planning' is today recognized – at least in words – by almost all current bourgeois and petty bourgeois tendencies, from fascist to Social Democratic."

But is someone like Donald Shoup trying to introduce the anarchy of the market, or suppress it? Consider:

> Parking had never crossed Shoup’s mind when he left Yale for L.A. in 1968—his focus was public finance and land-value theory. In 1975, he stumbled onto a master’s thesis by two USC students who had worked their way through school parking cars for a man named Rex Link. “Link,” says Shoup, “was annoyed that county workers were offered free parking downtown when federal workers had to pay. ” Link’s student employees proposed a study. “They found that 72 percent of county workers drove to work alone,” says Shoup, “but 60 percent of federal employees carpooled, took public transportation, or even walked. These were workers in the same professions, driving to the same location.” When forced to pay a practical value for their parking, drivers were twice as likely to carpool—traffic congestion was halved, carbon emissions were halved. “The more I thought of that,” says Shoup, “the more I thought there was a perfect storm here. __No one can tell you why parking prices are set as they are. But when people pay comparatively little for something that’s expensive to produce, the result is collective irrational behavior.”__

The Market has been so mystified by its apologists that we no longer recognize a planned economy when we see it. It's true that that last sentence is, in some ways, redolent of old pro-market critiques of Soviet planning: when prices are arbitrarily decreed by the state rather than equilibrated in competitive markets, irrational and suboptimal outcomes are the result. But Shoup's alternative is not merely to unleash the anarchy of the market, in which private firms somehow compete to offer parking at the lowest price. The ExpressPark experiment, as described in the first quote, is an exemplary case of central planning. The city begins by decreeing a production target, which in this case is maintaining one empty parking space on each street. The complex system of sensors and pricing algorithms is then used to create price signals that will meet the target. The key point here is that the capitalist market's causal arrow has been reversed: rather than market price fluctuations leading to an unpredictable level of production, it is the production target that comes first, and the prices are dictated by the quota. What this reminds me of, more than anything, is some of the abortive experiments in economic planning that happened in the USSR under Kruschev, as fictionalized in Francis Spufford's *Red Plenty*. Mathematicians and economists, including the Nobel prize winner Leonid Kantorovich, attempted to use the mechanism of prices, not to restore capitalism, but to make central planning work better. Consider this exchange, which Spufford invents between Kantorovich and his academic critics:

> ‘But what about the evident similarity between your “valuations” and the market prices of a capitalist economy?’ asked Boyarskii, who was sounding rather strained.

> ‘It’s true that there is a formal resemblance,’ said Leonid Vitalevich. ‘But they have a completely different origin, and therefore a completely different meaning. __Whereas market prices are formed spontaneously, objective valuations – shadow prices – must be computed on the basis of an optimal plan. As the plan targets change, the valuations change.__ They are subordinate to the very different production relationships of a socialist society. Yet, yet, __the scope for their use is actually bigger under socialism.__ The capitalists actually agree with you, Dr Boyarskii, that the mathematical methods we’re talking about should only be applied on the small scale, on the level of the individual firm. They have no choice: there is no larger structure, in the economy of West Germany or the United States, in which they can be set to work. They have had some success, I believe. I’m sorry to say that, since George Danzig and Tjalling Koopmans made their discoveries of “linear programming” in America during the war, the techniques have been adopted there far more eagerly, far more quickly, than in the Soviet Union. Linear programmers in the USA calculate routes for airlines, and devise the investment policies of Wall Street corporations. But we still have an opportunity before us which is closed to the capitalists. Capitalism cannot calculate an optimum for a whole economy at once. We can. There is a fundamental harmony between optimal planning and the nature of socialist society.

This seems much closer to what Donald Shoup is doing than the traditional liberal conception of the free market. The same might be said of various "market based" solutions to climate change, which begin by setting price on carbon or a limit on total carbon emissions and then allow the rights to emit to be traded. Once again, the plan targets come first and the prices come second.

There is a second line of argument against markets, however; that they are not merely anarchic and inefficient, but also induce ideological mystifications that perpetuate capitalism and exploitation. Bertell Ollman puts the point as follows in his [criticism of market socialism](http://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/market_mystification.php):

> One major virtue of centrally planned societies, then, even undemocratic ones, even ones that don't work very well, is that __it is easy to see who is responsible for what goes wrong. It is those who made the plan. The same cannot be said of market economies which have as one of their main functions to befuddle the understanding of those who live in them.__ This is essential if people are to misdirect whatever frustration and anger they feel about the social and economic inequality, unemployment, idle machines and factories, ecological destruction, widespread corruption and exaggerated forms of greed that are the inevitable byproducts of market economies. But to the extent this is so, only a critique of market mystification will enable us to put the blame where it belongs, which is to say—on the capitalist market as such and the class that rules over it, in order to open people up to the need for creating a new way of organizing the production and distribution of social wealth.

This attack, too, fails to land a blow against the LA parking experiment. Despite the presence of price signals, and a market, it is no mystery who is responsible for the new regime of fluctuating meter prices: the city of Los Angeles, urged on by its academic homunculus Donald Shoup. Indeed, it is the very visibility of the planners that makes projects like this so controversial among those who take their right to free parking for granted, and who oppose policies like congestion pricing that would mitigate traffic by charging drivers for entering busy areas. This is also part of what makes cap-and-trade climate policy vulnerable to right-wing attack; whatever its "market based" costume, everyone knows that the policy begins with government lawmakers and bureaucrats.

Which is not to say that all opposition to these schemes is unfounded. There's a blind spot that characterizes many proponents of things like the re-pricing of parking, particularly those who we learned to call "left neo-liberals" this summer. It's captured in the second phrase I bolded in that first passage: "people will park based on how much they’re willing to pay versus how far they are willing to walk to a destination." In just three words, "willing to pay", we have swept away the inequality of wealth and power that any attempt to turn market mechanisms toward planned ends must confront. Willingness to pay, of course, is also a function of *ability* to pay, and a market mechanism implicitly attributes worth to a person's desires in proportion to the money they have to spend.

Thoughtful neoclassical economists [know this](http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/04/hoisted-from-the-archives-a-non-socratic-dialogue-on-social-welfare-functions.html), but they usually choose to ignore it, presumably because the consequences of confronting it would be too politically uncomfortable. Their own theories tell them that, due to the [decreasing marginal utility of money](http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2010/06/16/the-marginal-utility-of-money/), an extra dollar is worth more to the poor than to the rich. It follows that asking an extra dollar for parking hurts the well-being of the poor far more than the rich, and systematically privileges those who don't need to think twice about paying six dollars for a parking space. To which a good left neo-liberal would no doubt reply that the issues of rational pricing and wealth redistribution are logically distinct and should be thought separately. But politically, this means that redistribution is the lonely last instance that never comes.

All of which is enough to make a good progressive recoil from such a thing as "the market price for street parking". But this position is not nearly audacious enough. Rather than a rejection of market relations, this is merely a rejection of a novel form of planning, in favor of the older, more obscure, more unfair and more inefficient methods of planning the use of public space. We could say instead that what's needed is a direct assault on the inequalities of wealth and income that subvert the functioning of prices, and thereby impede the realization of the plan.

Now that the new *Jacobin* is live, I can point out the essay I've been teasing for a while in my posts. It builds on the thought experiment I carried out in my ["Anti-Star Trek"](http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/12/anti-star-trek-a-theory-of-posterity/) post, in which I imagined a fully automated economy where class and profit was based entirely on intellectual property. In the new piece, that hypothetical is just one of four possible futures---two egalitarian utopias and two class-divided dystopias. It's an attempt to think more systematically about the interaction between automation, ecological and resource limits, and class, and it's available to [read](http://jacobinmag.com/winter-2012/four-futures/) online.

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

[The first post](http://www.mrteacup.org/post/peer-production-illusion-part-1.html) argues that "in practice, the open source software movement is compatible with and influenced by capitalism", which "casts doubt on overly optimistic claims that peer production is intrinsically anti-capitalist." Teacup shows that much of what looks like voluntary non-waged peer production really isn't, because most of the work is done by employees of private firms which pay them to work on open source projects. He compares things like the Apache web server software to physical infrastructure: just as capitalists pay taxes that go to build things like roads and sewer systems through the medium of the state, so too firms will collectively fund the development of software that they all use, but from which none of them derives a comparative advantage.

I find little here to disagree with---clearly, P2P isn't *inherently* anti-capitalist, and the analogy with physical infrastructure is an astute one. But the [second post in the series](http://www.mrteacup.org/post/peer-production-illusion-part-2.html) goes on to to criticize a slightly different view:

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

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

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

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

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

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

But you obviously can't take that position if you think P2P production is an inseparable part of a neoliberal capitalism that's even worse than the order that preceded it. The alternative that remains is basically to go back to mid-20th Century social democracy, and to try to restore a real, pure capitalism in which all value-creating labor is rewarded with a wage (although as David Graeber [points out](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/08/the-return-of-the-politics-of-debt/#comment-354626525), actually-existing capitalism has always depended on lots of labor that doesn't fit the archetype of contractual wage labor).

A better strategy, I think, would be to learn from those moments when the working class responded to new forms of exploitation not by shoring up the old status quo, but by making a counter-move that advanced the economy forward to yet another new stage. When industrialization threatened traditional craft skills, one response of the labor movement was a craft unionism that tried to preserve the privileges of a small subset of skilled workers. But it was the more radical industrial unions that ultimately helped make possible the social democratic compromise that neoliberalism later undermined---a compromise based on accepting certain kinds of productivity-enhancing, deskilling technological changes in return for a share of the resulting rise in output. Just as craft unions were inadequate to an industrial age, the logic of class struggle in the factory is unlikely to be adequate to a post-industrial context. The question then, isn't whether P2P is or isn't capitalist, but whether we can get its capitalist integument to [burst asunder](http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32.htm).

I haven't been a regular reader of [Steve Randy Waldman](http://www.interfluidity.com/), which I now realize was a big mistake. I just discovered a [post of his](http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/918.html) from last year that relates to one of my political preoccupations: the idea that everyone should receive a ["Basic Income"](http://www.basicincome.org/bien/) to which they are entitled as citizens and which is not in any way conditional on whether or how much they work. In the process of figuring out his argument, I also realized that the debate we've been having between "fiscal" and "monetary" solutions to the employment crisis is kind of a distraction from the real issues.

The Basic Income is, obviously, a fairly radical demand, and one that may seem implausible in the context of American culture and its Protestant work ethic. However, there are reasons to think that you could build a diverse political coalition around it. One reason is that the Basic Income is embraced not only by left-wing socialists, but by some [right-wing libertarians](http://crookedtimber.org/2006/06/01/charles-murrays-in-our-hands-left-or-right/). Of course, the right wing version of the policy is different, because right-wing proponents want it to do different things; in particular, they don't want a basic income so high that it discourages people from working, whereas I regard that as a [feature rather than a bug](http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/02/do-they-owe-us-a-living/). Nevertheless, there is potential for alliances in the short run.

But thanks to Waldman, I now see that there is another argument for basic income; this one comes neither from the socialist left nor the libertarian right, but from the technocratic liberal center. For as Waldman explains, a form of Basic Income could be used by the Federal Reserve as a tool of macroeconomic stabilization and regulation of the business cycle.

Recall that the Fed is supposed to use its policies to keep unemployment as low as possible, while also keeping inflation under control. As Waldman explains in [this post](http://www.interfluidity.com/posts/1256656346.shtml), there have been two different periods of Federal Reserve policy in the United States: one in which inflation was controlled by causing mass unemployment (and thus there was a direct tradeoff between the employment and price stability mandates), and one in which they focused on controlling asset prices and access to credit:

> __Prior to the Great Moderation, central bankers had to provoke recessions in order to control inflation.__ Broad-based wage growth led to increases in nominal cashflows by "spenders" that could only be tempered by creating unemployment or other conditions under which workers would accept wage concessions. In the post-Reagan world, growth in the sticky component of disposable income shifted to the wealthy, who tend to save rather than spend their raises. __The marginal dollar of consumer expenditure switched from wages to borrowed money.__ The great thing about consumption funded by credit expansion, from a central banker's point of view, is that it is not sticky downward — no one who gets a loan today assumes that she will be able to expand her borrowing by the same amount every year. __Credit-based consumption is susceptible to monetary policy with far less impact on employment than wage-based consumption.__

In other words, the stagnation of median wages and the funnelling of income growth to the top 1% is directly related to the pattern of credit expansion and asset bubbles that we've seen over the past 30 years. See Waldman's post for an explanation of why, while it's *possible* to have an ongoing dynamic where economic growth is fueled by repeated bubbles followed by debt cancellation, this isn't a desirable state of affairs. What I'm interested in is the [later post](http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/918.html) where Waldman gives a third stabilization strategy: having the Fed hand out free money, the mythical ["Helicopter Drop"](http://neweconomicperspectives.blogspot.com/2010/01/helicopter-drops-are-fiscal-operations.html):

> We should try to arrange things so that the marginal unit of CPI is purchased with "helicopter drop" money. That is, __rather than trying to fine-tune wages, asset prices, or credit, central banks should be in the business of fine tuning a rate of transfers from the bank to the public.__ During depressions and disinflations, the Fed should be depositing funds directly in bank accounts at a fast clip. During booms, the rate of transfers should slow to a trickle. We could reach the "zero bound", but a different zero bound than today’s zero interest rate bugaboo. At the point at which the Fed is making no transfers yet inflation still threatens, the central bank would have to coordinate with Congress to do "fiscal policy" in the form of negative transfers, a.k.a. taxes. However, this zero bound would be reached quite rarely if we allow transfers to displace credit expansion as the driver of money growth in the economy. In other words, at the same time as we expand the use of "helicopter money" in monetary policy, we should regulate and simplify banks, impose steep capital requirements, and relish complaints that this will "reduce credit availability". __The idea is to replace the macroeconomic role of bank credit with freshly issued cash.__

He further elaborates that he thinks "central banks should make equal transfers to all adult citizens irrespective of income, job, or tax status." Although he doesn't use the term, this is just basic income by another name--the only difference (and obviously, it's a significant one) is that the level of the the BI grant fluctuates rather than being set at a stable level. So you could say that there are now three distinct versions of the basic income, coming from across the political spectrum: the leftist version demands a high BI, the rightist version wants a low BI, and the centrist version advocates a varying BI.

But I'm not sure where any of these proposals would fit into Mike Konczal's [typology](http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2011/09/21/a-topological-mapping-of-explanations-and-policy-solutions-to-our-weak-economy/) of ways to fix the economy. This is obviously a "demand side" argument, but it sort of cuts across the argument between people who think we can get back to full employment [purely through monetary policy](http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/07/12/266468/atlantic-jobs-quasi-debate/) and those who think we need [fiscal stimulus](http://lbo-news.com/2011/07/16/the-limits-of-easy-money/) and/or [debt deleveraging](http://kantooseconomics.com/2011/09/12/mein-unbehagen-mit-quasi-monetarismus-my-discomfort-with-quasi-monetarism/). Waldman is making a monetary policy argument in the sense that he's advocating stimulus via Federal Reserve control of the money supply. But this isn't anything like the way the Fed currently operates--indeed, as Waldman acknowledges, you'd have to [change the law](http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/2110.html) to allow the Fed to do what he's advocating here, since at present they're only allowed to exchange money for assets, and can't just give it away.

So rather than break things down into "monetary" and "fiscal" camps, maybe it's better to think of the situation as follows:

- The big divide is between people who want to reflate the economy by continuing to channel money to the top of the income distribution and expanding debt for everyone else, and those who want to do it by a broad-based, redistributive program that puts money in the hands of the masses.
- Within the "give more money to the rich" camp, there is a split between people who want to rely on tax cuts, fiscal austerity, and deregulation of business, and those who want to have the Fed print money and use it to [inflate the price of risky assets](http://www.businessinsider.com/preview-of-the-fed-meeting-and-operation-twist-2011-9).
- Within the "give more money to everybody else" camp, there is a split between people who want the government to directly employ people with some kind of jobs program, and people who just want to start giving everyone money.

While I would prefer the job-creation version of egalitarian stimulus to either of the inegalitarian alternatives, I think it would be even better to have a smaller amount of job-creation spending for things we really do need (like infrastructure), combined with the Basic Income/Helicopter Drop plan. This woud be both more just and more radical; and as Waldman also points out, in some ways guaranteed income is a substitute for the declining labor movement:

> If people grow accustomed to getting sizable checks from the central bank, that would change behavior. But not all changes are bad. For example, it may be true that __many workers would be pickier about what jobs to take__ if government transfers generated incomes they could get by on without employment. __Employers would undoubtedly have to pay people who work unpleasant jobs more than they currently do.__ But that’s just another way of saying that __workers would have greater bargaining power in negotiating employment, as their next best alternative would not be destitution.__ That we’ve spent 40 years increasing the bargaining power of capital over labor doesn’t make it "fair", or good economics. __Supplementary incomes are a cleaner way of increasing labor bargaining power than unionization. Unionization forces collective bargaining, which leads to one-size-fits-all work rules and inflexible hiring, firing, and promotion policies, in addition to higher wages.__ If workers have supplementary incomes, employment arrangements can be negotiated on terms specific to individuals and business circumstances, but outcomes will be more favorable to workers than they would have been absent an income to fall back upon.

Of course, there are other important things that unions do, like intervene in politics and advocate for better conditions in the workplace. For that reason, I won't go all the way to the "unions bad/redistribution good" argument that Waldman seems to be making and which characterizes a lot of progressive neoliberalism. However, I do think this is a useful counter to [the argument of people like Doug Henwood](http://lbo-news.com/2011/07/16/the-limits-of-easy-money/) that stimulus via monetary policy doesn't do anything to increase the power of labor. It all depends just what kind of "monetary policy" you're talking about.

Capital strike. Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time. But it's not dead...not yet.

The idea of a "capital strike" has been around forever. It's the obvious complement to the labor strike: just as workers can shut down production by refusing to come to work, capital can shut down the economy by refusing to invest and hire workers. You can find discussions of capital strikes [during the Great Depression](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/12/the-capital-str.html). But as a theoretical concept, the capital strike was popularized by the neo-Marxist theorists of the 1970's and 1980's. Adam Przeworksi used it in *Capitalism and Social Democracy* to explain why reformist projects of redistribution ultimately run up against a revolutionary limit. He notes that:

> Under normal circumstances it can be expected that the increase of aggregate demand should stimulate investment and employment. Redistributional measures . . . are usually justified by appeals not only to justice but also to efficiency. ([Przeworski](http://books.google.com/books/about/Capitalism_and_social_democracy.html?id=F5BsIDS3ntwC), p. 44)

But as long as investment decisions are left in private hands, there's a problem:

> Such a program cannot be successful, however, when economic demands grow spontaneously and when they are accompanied by structural transformations. . . . Increased government intervention means precisely that non-market rationality is imposed upon the process of accumulation, that is, that capitalists are forced to make allocations which are suboptimal with regard to profit. Measures of nationalization, distribution of land, and monopolization of credit and foreign exchange by the state threaten the very institution of private profit. Under such circumstances, rational private capitalists will not invest. (p. 45)

Likewise, Claus Offe used the possibility of capital strike to identify the limits of the welfare state:

> __The constraints that the capitalist economy imposes upon the state__, thereby disorganizing its capacity to maintain 'order' by responding effectively to political demands and requirements, __are based upon capital's *power to obstruct*__. As long as investment decisions are 'free', that is, as long as they obey the rule of maximum expected profitability, the decisive variable constraining 'realistic' political opinions is what Kalecki has called 'business confidence'. The ultimate political sanction is non-investment or the threat of it (just as much as the ultimate source of power of the individual capitalist *vis-à-vis* the individual worker is non-employment or termination of employment). __The foundation of capitalist power and domination is this institutionalized right of capital withdrawal, of which economic crisis is nothing but the aggregate manifestation.__ (Offe, [*Contradictions of the Welfare State*](http://books.google.com/books?id=9aMgAQAAIAAJ), p. 244)

Today, however, this leftist argument isn't heard much, probably because real challenges to the power of capital are so thin on the ground. But lately I've noticed that "capital strike", like "capitalism" before it, seems to have gone from a left-wing pejorative to a term that is proudly claimed by Capital and its agents. Here's Charles Krauthammer explaining that Capital is on strike against the Obama administration (he says the phrase right at the end of the clip):

And just yesterday, John Boehner said in a speech that "job creators" (Republican code for capitalists) are [on strike](http://www.speaker.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=260229):

> I can tell you the American people -- private-sector job creators in particular --- are rattled by what they’ve seen out of this town over the last few years. My worry is that for American job creators, all the uncertainty is turning to fear that this toxic environment for job creation is a permanent state. __Job creators in America are essentially on strike.__ The problem is not confusion about the policies. . .the problem is the policies.

Thinking in terms of a capital strike is also helpful in understanding the debate in economics between, on the one hand, liberal technocrats like Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman, and on the other hand reactionary economists like Robert Lucas and Robert Barro. Barro, for example, [argues that](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/opinion/sunday/how-to-really-save-the-economy.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1&ref=opinion) investment requires "Stable expectations of a sound economic environment, including the long-run path of tax rates, regulations and so on." He then proposes a series of policies that he believes will reassure investors and create such a "sound" economy, including cutting Social Security, abolishing corporate and estate taxes, and of course cutting income taxes.

In response, DeLong, Krugman, and others have spent plenty of time showing that business is not [overly worried](http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2011/09/mark-thoma-sends-us-to-gary-burtless-on-how-it-is-not-regulatory-and-tax-uncertainty-that-has-depressed-the-economy.html) about uncertainty, but rather is concerned about weak consumer demand. Tax rates are at historically low levels; the rich are richer than ever; corporations are sitting on their cash hoards; and so on. All true: but none of these arguments really matter.

People like Barro aren't neutral, objective economic analysts--they're advocates for one side in a power struggle between capital and labor. It may well be true that capital is not, in fact, on strike against taxes and regulations. Given the incoherency of the capitalist class that I've [previously discussed](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/08/the-decay-of-the-capitalist-class/), it's hard to imagine capital getting its act together in this way. And for all the fulmination of the teabaggers, we're certainly not in the position Przeworski described, where "the state threaten[s] the very institution of private profit". But just as in a labor strike, sometimes you don't actually have to go out on the picket line: you just have to convince the other side that you're ready and willing to strike. Just as a union might use a strike authorization vote to increase its leverage at the bargaining table, so the the right's economic propaganda is designed to tilt the political playing field away from labor and toward capital.

But "capital strike" started out as the left's term, and it might be to our benefit to reclaim it. Doing so would give us an additional answer to the austerity faction, one that goes one step beyond the technocratic liberal answer that "there is no capital strike/all we need is to increase aggregate demand". We can go on to point out that, if there *is* a capital strike, that doesn't imply that we should just give in to Capital. When labor goes on strike, the boss can give in to the workers' demands, but the alternative is for the [Pinkertons](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_the_United_States) or [the President](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5604656) to break the union. Likewise, when faced with a capital strike, we have alternatives to capitulation; these range in severity from wealth redistribution, through to debt forgiveness, and all the way to outright [expropriation](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/23/business/worldbusiness/23sweden.html).

Today, of course, isn't the real [labor day](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Workers_Day), merely a fake American version with origins in the machinations of [anti-labor politicians](http://curiousnewyork.blogspot.com/2011/09/origins-of-labor-day.html).

Still, we can celebrate any day that's a holiday. It may be true, as [this *New York Times* op-ed says](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/opinion/sunday/do-happier-people-work-harder.html?ref=opinion), that "Labor Day is meant to be a celebration of work". But as the same article goes on to say:

> The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, which has been polling over 1,000 adults every day since January 2008, shows that Americans now feel worse about their jobs — and work environments — than ever before. People of all ages, and across income levels, are unhappy with their supervisors, apathetic about their organizations and detached from what they do. And there’s no reason to think things will soon improve.

Rather than celebrate work, I'd prefer to celebrate *workers*. And the best way to truly pay respect to the workers of the world is not to glorify the [misfortune of labor](http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/03/undercover-boss-and-the-misfortune-of-labor/), but to celebrate those temporary moments of freedom from wage labor that the workers' movement has managed to win.

Here are a couple of relevant passages on that theme. [Via](http://jacobinmag.com/blog/?p=1473) Malcolm Harris, I was recently reminded of [this passage](http://operaismoinenglish.wordpress.com/2010/09/29/struggle-against-labor/) from Mario Tronti that makes that's still relevant after nearly 50 years:

> The contemporary forms of workers’ struggles in the heartlands of advanced capitalism unmistakably reveal, in the rich content of their own spontaneity, the slogan of __the struggle against wage labor as the only possible means of striking real blows against capital.__ The party must be the organization of what already exists within the class, but which the class alone cannot succeed in organizing. No worker today is disposed to recognize the existence of labor outside capital. __Labor equals exploitation: This is the logical prerequisite and historical result of capitalist civilization.__ From here there is no point of return. __Workers have no time for the dignity of labor. The “pride of the producer” they leave entirely to the boss.__ Indeed, only the boss now remains to declaim eulogies in praise of labor. True, in the organized working-class movement this traditional chord is, unfortunately, still to be heard – but not in the working class itself; here there is no longer any room for ideology. Today, the working class need only look at itself to understand capital. It need only combat itself in order to destroy capital. It has to recognize itself as political power, deny itself as a productive force. For proof, we need only look at the moment of struggle itself: During the strike, the "producer" is immediately identified with the class enemy. The working class confronts its own labor as capital, as a hostile force, as an enemy – this is the point of departure not only for the antagonism, but for the organization of the antagonism.

> __If the alienation of the worker has any meaning, it is a highly revolutionary one. The organization of alienation: This is the only possible direction in which the party can lead the spontaneity of the class.__ The goal remains that of refusal, at a higher level: It becomes active and collective, a political refusal on a mass scale, organized and planned. Hence, the immediate task of working-class organization is to overcome passivity.

And then there's this, from André Gorz's misunderstood classic [*Farewell to the Working Class*](http://books.google.com/books?id=7wxpl7sYYCYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=gorz+farewell+working+class&hl=en&ei=Nb5jTpqyF6rv0gG1heGKCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false):

> For workers, it is no longer a question of freeing themselves within work, putting themselves in control of work, or seizing power within the framework of their work. The point now is to free oneself from work by rejecting its nature, content, necessity and modalities. But to reject work is also to reject the traditional strategy and organisational forms of the working-class movement. It is no longer a question of winning power as a worker but of winning the power no longer to function as a worker. The power at issue is not at all the same as before. The class itself has entered into crisis.

So enjoy the beer and barbecues folks, and revel in your power not to function as a worker.