Return of the managerial demiurge (11 Jan 2012)

It sort of veers in a different direction by the end, but Žižek's new LRB essay is actually a pretty lucid explanation of the terminology from autonomist Marxism, sewing the jargon together in a cohesive whole. Here's his quick summary of Hardt and Negri's Multitude argument:

Only with the rise of ‘immaterial labour’, that a revolutionary reversal has become ‘objectively possible’. This immaterial labour extends between two poles: from intellectual labour (production of ideas, texts, programs etc) to affective labour (carried out by doctors, babysitters and flight attendants). Today, immaterial labour is ‘hegemonic’ in the sense in which Marx proclaimed that, in 19th-century capitalism, large industrial production was hegemonic: it imposes itself not through force of numbers but by playing the key, emblematic structural role. What emerges is a vast new domain called the ‘commons’: shared knowledge and new forms of communication and co-operation. The products of immaterial production aren’t objects but new social or interpersonal relations; immaterial production is bio-political, the production of social life.

Žižek argues that profit in contemporary capitalism comes not from commodity production and circulation but from being able to privatize the commons by force and extract rents through regimes of intellectual property enforcement and that sort of thing. He offers Microsoft as an example, but for me the paradigmatic example is Facebook, which collects rents (indirectly, from advertisers and data collectors) for hosting our "social graph" and tries to embed itself into our everyday social practices.

Later in the article Žižek sounds less like Negri and more like Wright Mills when he starts describing the disappearance of the 19th century entrepreneurs and the emergence of the white collar classes, the salarymen, the managerial demiurge. Since immaterial production is a collective thing, different salaries for different people can't be justified by their differing levels of productivity or the relative rarity of their skills, as neoclassical economists would have it. Instead, wage levels are determined by preexisting status, which tends to be arbitrary.

The evaluative procedure that qualifies some workers to receive a surplus wage is an arbitrary mechanism of power and ideology, with no serious link to actual competence; the surplus wage exists not for economic but for political reasons: to maintain a ‘middle class’ for the purpose of social stability. The arbitrariness of social hierarchy is not a mistake, but the whole point, with the arbitrariness of evaluation playing an analogous role to the arbitrariness of market success. Violence threatens to explode not when there is too much contingency in the social space, but when one tries to eliminate contingency.

So much for meritocracy. The middle class, then, consists not of a bunch of hard-working burghers but of people who inherited their political privilege (winners of the family lottery) and learned how to leverage it or learned how to adapt themselves so they could serve as ideologically useful token success stories. They pull in "surplus wage" -- a term that doesn't seem very useful to me, but which is supposed to mean the amount over the sustenance wage that capitalism presumably would drive everyone's wages to, ceteris paribus. The "surplus" idea seems to muddy the water; the point is that pre-existing class status determines pay in corporate structures, which try to calibrate the size of the middle class relative to the potential for mass unrest. Make as few middle managers as necessary to forestall revolt, and pay them enough to feel special and indebted to the status quo system.

What's more, Žižek, drawing on Jean-Pierre Dupuy, claims that success has to seem arbitrary to us, basically to make us to depressed to rebel. If success could be deserved, earned, we would have reason to be outraged when hard work doesn't beat status. As it is, we can always mistake privilege for luck. Žižek interprets the rise in protests recently as partly attributable to would-be meritocrats discovering there is no meritocracy and their modicum of inherited privilege no longer makes the grade. They won't get their "surplus wage" but will be precarious like everyone else.

The End of the Consumer Society (20 July 2011)

When the financial crisis began in earnest, lots of articles began appearing about the "new frugality" and the inevitable change in values that would occur in the absence of easy debt financing for consumer spending sprees. Financial analysts like David Rosenberg were pushing the argument that we would experience "secular changes in attitudes towards credit, savings, discretionary spending and homeownership" (original link broken, I cited it here) that would prevent a return to a consumer-driven economy. Apparently that's exactly what's happening, judging by this column from Sunday's NYT by David Leonhardt: "Consumer spending will not soon return to the growth rates of the 1980s and ’90s," he avers. "They depended on income people didn’t have." The evidence:

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently published a jarring report on what it calls discretionary service spending, a category that excludes housing, food and health care and includes restaurant meals, entertainment, education and even insurance. Going back decades, such spending had never fallen more than 3 percent per capita in a recession. In this slump, it is down almost 7 percent, and still has not really begun to recover.

Jared Bernstein is somewhat skeptical of this, pointing out that consumer spending's share of GDP hasn't declined and that the actual structural economic change is in residential investment. Though some economic commentators have been expecting an imminent housing recovery, Scott Sumner makes the case that housing seems unlikely to pick up because the rate of household formation has slowed dramatically, which he attributes to immigration crackdowns and the fact that more "20-somethings who can’t get jobs are living with their parents."

This concatenation of persistent joblessness, frugality, economic stagnation, and grown-up children living with their parents is reminiscent of what happened during Japan's "lost decade," and it probably won't be long it will be until we begin reading more about the American equivalent of hikikomori. I have been generally skeptical that consumerist attitudes would change regardless of income, because I see consumerism as a reflection of using goods to rearticulate status hierarchies, not as materialism as such. Goods are a communicative system; the new frugality alters the meanings of some of the terms but doesn't impoverish the language altogether. Here's what I wrote before:

Consumerist society has for too long emphasized possessions as the route to social recognition, not collaboration. The tangibility of objects seems to substantiate the argument -- the inarguable presence of more stuff seems to testify to a richer life, and marketing gives all that stuff rich meanings and fully developed fantasies we can readily enter into vicariously. And our ability to soberly question consumerism's role in our lives is hampered not only by our hedonism (the familiar and common-sense-seeming logic of "more is better") but by the persuasion industry's relentless collective efforts to invalidate ways of life that are not reliant on consuming products. Lifestyle magazines and the styles sections in newspapers help by making frugality into a trend that is marked by buying certain products and shopping at certain stores. The underlying message: We can spend less but remain consumers. So we don't need to fear.
Taking its cue from the press, the ad business will try to sell us anticonsumer goods, goods that paradoxically promise to fit in to our new recession-minded lifestyle. This not only helps ad firms continue to sell ads in a downmarket, but also helps ads maintain their prominence in the sum of our daily thinking. Ads preserve a lever in our minds, so they can reorient us to luxury when the time comes.

And here's another post I wrote in April 2009 about the "gleefully frugal"

But has the specter of slackerdom now been cast across the land? Has compulsive frugality moved us beyond competitive conspicuous consumption and the corrosive values of consumerism, despite those values' deep embeddedness in the discourses that structure our society? In the face of the enormous bulk of advertising and the engrained notion that status must be indicated through savvy product choices, have we really started to turn our backs on consumerism and adopt a post-materialistic attitude, as so many cultural critics have long urged? Maybe those people living paycheck to paycheck who are running out of money at the end of the month are learning to see that it's actually best that way. They are enjoying the really important things that deprivation can reacquaint them with -- togetherness, family, nature, and so on. Likewise, underemployment is a chance to enjoy the riches of leisure, if you can block out the nagging insecurities of precarity from your mind.

At the Economist's American politics blog, Will WIlkinson recently champions the post-materialist way, citing this survey as proof that prosperity engenders a shift in values toward autonomy and self-expression once economic survival is guaranteed. Presumably being able to show how creative you are on your own terms becomes more important than showing how much stuff you have after working hard for someone else. Wilkinson's counterpart at the blog, Matt Steinglass, concurs, writing, "What I'm trying to say here is that it seems to me that people may just be sick of buying new stuff. Or at least of buying the kinds of new stuff that the consumer economy of recent decades has been based on producing." Steinglass suggests arecovery will be driven by collectively demanded goods -- infrastructure and the like -- but of course that would need to be administered by the state, which is politically infeasible, given today's GOP, which doesn't care about economic recovery or rotting infrastructure but only its rentier clients.

Has there been a general shift in values, though? Do people want less stuff and are thus willing to work less? Do we choose unemployment over drudgery and better appliances? Are we all eager to "take our share of the economic surplus in leisure," as it's sometimes technocratically expressed? (I wonder if this is a reason new households aren't forming. Opting out of parenting, say, is a frugal lifestyle choice.) Reading values from macroeconomic data seems like slippery hermeneutics. (The mere fact of a drop in consumer spending doesn't necessarily mean a drop in the desire to spend, unless you assume revealed preference is the only reality that matters.) Wilkinson makes the case that for creative-class types, being an economic free agent isn't so terrible once you choose autonomy over material goods. Rather than make as much as you can, you can be a "threshold earner," make what you need for your minimalist lifestyle, and then segue into "medium chill" mode, to use David Roberts's coinage: "This is me," Wilkinson admits. "I don't want to maximise income. I want to maximise autonomy and time for unremunerative but satisfying creative work." To an extent, that is me also, and it's indicative of my relative privilege and my inherited social and cultural capital and whatnot -- it's a reflection of having a safety net in place (in the form of supportive relatives, inherited income, social capital, etc.) and the confidence that one could find more work whenever necessary. But, as Wilkinson notes, "whatever our level of education, if unemployment benefits and odd jobs add up to enough to keep us above a socially acceptable material threshold, we will not be in a hurry to accept any available employment, no matter how unpleasant or unsuitable." That sounds a little like work refusal and is perhaps why the safety net is under such systematic assault. This is precisely the sort of value shift capitalism can't afford. If capitalists lose their leverage over labor, from whom will they extract surplus value? If you can't force people to work for you and enrich yourself from it, what's the sense of being a capitalist? (Ideally the capitalists would see it that way as well, surrender to the multitude, and help usher in the great socialist millennium.)

Consumerist values have always been deployed to militate against work refusal, but they don't work as an effective carrot when there isn't enough money in circulation, or enough wages, to permit people to play that game. (Section three of this article by Joshua Clover on the financial crisis offers an overview of how and why this can happen). You can try to get people to strive for alternate forms of currency (attention, status) but if that doesn't work, that's when the stick of precarity comes into play. It seems like the end of consumerism because the stick is out and the carrot has vanished. Leonhardt, et al., are arguing that the carrot can't come ever back, which seems to imply precarity forever. If that's the case, the natural ideological move would be to sell precarity as liberation, just as consumer choice was once sold, while fighting to assure that liberation never occurs in practice, the safety net is perennially endangered, and autonomy remains instead merely a plausible dream form most people.

"Every Person for Themselves" Economy (18 March 2011)

Justin Fox, who doesn't blog enough anymore, wrote a good post about this Democracy article by Andrei Cherny, about the "Individual Age." That's Cherny's phrase for what used to be called "the new capitalism" and what left-leaning types (like me) tend to describe as "precarity" or "post-Fordist labor conditions." The security that once came from long-term employment with large firms and the safety net supplied jointly by employers and the state (and secured through labor union activism) were discarded with the rise of neoliberalism, which preached deregulation, outsourcing, globalization and total worker flexibility (remember Who Moved My Cheese the 1990s ode to employee servility?). Neoliberal (or post-Fordist or postindustrial) relations of production dispensed with employer-employee loyalty and made most workers free agents, drifting from job to job, perpetually insecure, perpetually having to sell one's usefulness anew to employers always looking for reasons to get rid of you. Fox cites this 1997 Fast Company article, "Free Agent Nation" by Dan Pink, as an early reflection of these changes; Richard Sennett's The Culture of the New Capitalism and The Corrosion of Character are all about these developments as well, and more recently Tina Brown termed it "the gig economy."

Here's how Cherny explains this change:

The differences between the economy of the 19th century and that of the 21st are too many to list, but today, as in Jefferson’s time of independent farmers and shopkeepers, it is individuals, not large conglomerations, that propel the economy. The number of Americans working for themselves is growing rapidly and most Americans no longer work full-time for someone else. Yet it is not just the self-employed or entrepreneurs who are part of this new world. Every worker is grappling with the Individual Age. Lifetime employment with a single company is largely a thing of the past and the dependable health, retirement, and training benefits such a relationship held are fast disappearing. Americans born between 1957 and 1964 held an average of 11 jobs between the ages of 18 and 44. That trend is accelerating and is much more pronounced among those born in later decades. Untethered from large institutions, bouncing from one job to the next, today each individual is ultimately responsible for guiding their own career and economic future. Today, everyone is an entrepreneur; everyone is their own small business.

The way Cherny tells it, this "trend" is just sort of happening and no one is driving it or can do anything about it; it's just the world historical process playing itself out. This elides the actual concerted effort (ideological, political, economic, etc.) that has gone into making the neoliberal condition a reality, allowing for the needs of capital to dictate the living conditions of more and more people, subsuming more and more of everyday life.

Cherny hopes that government will change policy to support personal entrepreneurhood: "Health-care and retirement benefits should be made more personalized, portable, affordable, and universal." But as Fox points out, the emergence of the entrepreneurial self undermines the sort of solidarity necessary to lobby the government for this change to be implemented and for fairer tax treatment and the like. "To get us laws that reflect the new workplace reality, Free Agent Nation, by its very nature dispersed and allergic to large organizations, needs to develop a unified voice. Can it?" Fox asks. I'm pretty skeptical that it can; the destruction of such solidarity is almost explicitly the purpose of neoliberal reform, as the attack on public-sector unions' bargaining rights suggests. The goal is to get every person thinking and acting for themselves, which makes them most desperate and vulnerable -- oh, wait, I'm sorry, I meant free and flexible.

Pink, in the Fast Company article, paints a picture of precarity as knowledge workers making a savvy career choice to be independent, outside the corporate box and therefore "authentic." Various interviewees in the article gloat about their blissful work lives, like this serial small-time entrepreneur:

"I used to think that what I needed to do was balance my life, keep my personal and professional lives separate," she says. "But I discovered that the real secret is integration. I integrate my work into my life. I don't see my work as separate from my identity." The mask is gone. For this free agent, work is who she is.

As Pink stresses, in the neoliberal world, "work is personal" and there are no boundaries separating work and nonwork. This fits with the tendency for our consumption to increasingly serve a productive function in the economy as "immaterial" or "affective" labor, contributing to marketing innovations and enhancing brands' equity and devising new uses for goods, new consumer wants, new ways to get pleasure from spending. As more of our self-presentation can be captured digitally and tracked and amalgamated, particularly through social media and mobile communications, our identities themselves become productive factories of economic value.

Pink assert this sort of thing makes work inseparable from fun. And maybe in a noncapitalist society the disappearance of work-life separation would mean freedom from alienation, pure harmonious praxis, meaningful and recognized work for one's livelihood. But under capitalism, this lack of boundaries yields limitless insecurity, and it leads us to entrepreneurialize ourselves, see ourselves as little firms and work hard to augment our personal brand (which seems to me synonymous with neoliberal subjectivity). Rather than work becoming fun, fun becomes work, and hipsterism in it current guise is born. Our identity work becomes anxious, calculating, inescapably reflexive, the opposite of spontaneous. We become conscious that every little gesture must ideally be turned to account somehow to help us get ahead and protect our standard of living.

I think the rise of social media -- beyond merely mobilizing immaterial labor -- has had a lot to do with structuring, promulgating, and naturalizing the entrepreneurial subjectivity necessary for neoliberalism to function smoothly. They support the concept ideologically and institutionally where government doesn't, giving us a sense that we are capitalizing on ourselves and compensating for the collectivity and security we've lost. So the personal brand supplants the personality or the lifestyle -- terms that horrified earlier generations of social critics worried about commercialized identity. Now we network and self-promote and see this as the extent and purpose of social life. Of course! How else could it be? Why wouldn't we capitalize on our friend quotient, our "social graph" -- why shouldn't we measure ourselves in terms of what we can sell about ourselves? That's now how we discover what is "authentic" about us. It seems that we are approaching a point that only what we can sell or hype about ourselves seems real to ourselves -- only what is retweeted or liked on Facebook speaks to who we really are.