Mike Konczal wrote a critique of Mitt Romney's plan to convert unemployment insurance into something that more closely resembles a 401(k) -- the idea being that everyone should have the "freedom" to manage their own unemployment insurance in accordance to how they assess their own personal risk. Of course, as Konczal notes, it would also help erode the idea that government exists in part to provide a general social safety net and aggregate social risk efficiently in order to defray it -- conservative thinking is that individuals should bear all of life's risks themselves. The private-account gambit is one of the quintessential neoliberal policy moves, ostensibly ending government "interference" in the labor market by making sure workers are as insecure as possible.
Conservatives favor these sort of arrangements, Konczal suggests, because "people will look at private savings accounts and think that the government isn’t doing anything." This furthers their arguments for dismantling the services government provides to all straightforwardly while protecting the "submerged" benefits that the rich, savvy, and well connected are better positioned to exploit through knowing how to take advantage of tax loopholes -- a phenomenon explored in this American Prospect essay by Suzanne Mettler and elaborated here by Henry Farrell. It reminds me also of arguments Dean Baker makes in The Conservative Nanny State (pdf) and Jamie Galbraith makes in The Predator State (excerpt here). They argue that the rich have figured out the government exists to be looted, and the key political question is how to perpetuate and mask that process at the same time. One good way of doing that is through expanding the "submerged state" and generating policies that confront people with decisions that they are not sophisticated enough to make on their own and make them into more vulnerable prey. Private retirement accounts, for example, are far more lootable by financial advisors, etc., than the guaranteed-benefit pensions they have supplanted. (In the mean time, conservatives have succeeded in convincing many of us that our Social Security benefits are insecure and that the U.S. government is perfectly capable of simply reneging on its debts.)
If neoliberal reform is intended to let markets govern more and more of our everyday lives, then it's not surprising that the tactics of exploitation rife in market exchange -- things akin to price discrimination and exploiting asymmetrical information and implementing hidden fees through confusing contracts -- will also come into play. Markets are often good at incentivizing complexity, which produces the ignorance they need as an alibi. Cell-phone service providers, mortgage originators, used-car salespeople, the travel industry (hotels, rental cars, airlines) are the classic exemplars of these tactics, but they are endemic in a consumer economy whose firms frequently depend on stratifying customers to maximize profits. But when applied to the distribution of tax obligations and government services, these tactics become the legitimized means for reproducing and expanding existing disparities between classes while making it seem as though that is the fault of the disadvantaged -- it's their fault for being ignorant, too "lazy" to master the tax code, or to drive hard bargains of their own.
In his response to Konzal's post, Corey Robin notes the needless complexity of the arrangement, "all the time and energy we as individuals now have to devote to doing the things that the state used to do for us" thanks to neoliberalism and privatization. Robin adds, "The right thinks of that as freedom—they hear the words 'state is doing for you' and they imagine patients etherized on a table—but I think of it as tyranny." Peter Frase concurs in this response, pointing out that "in a highly unequal society, greater complexity in the institutions of the state will generally favor the interests of the rich." He concludes that "the right has gotten a lot of mileage of out of the demand for small government. Maybe it’s time for the left to make a bigger deal out of simple government." That seems like a pretty good idea to me, though the logic may lead to supporting policies like the flat tax. Also, our tendency to overrate our pleasure in making decisions for ourselves (and underestimate the problem of ego depletion) makes us vulnerable to believing that it is generally simpler for us to do things ourselves and assume total responsibility for them. The celebration of individualism in American society is such that there is already ideological momentum behind the idea that self-managing everything is somehow always convenient, even in the face of frustrating experiences to the contrary, which are seen as isolated exceptions.
Showing posts with label unemployment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label unemployment. Show all posts
Friday, August 19, 2011
Marshall McLuhan Centennial (21 July 2011)
To mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan, Megan Garber has an extensive post about his ideas at the Neiman Journalism Lab site, pointing out, somewhat cryptically, that "McLuhan’s theories seem epic and urgent and obvious all at the same time. And McLuhan himself — the teacher, the thinker, the darling of the media he both measured and mocked — seems both more relevant, and less so, than ever before." I think that means that we take McLuan's useful insights more or less for granted even as they shape the contours of the debate about the impact of mediatization. McLuhan certainly wasn't afraid to make sweeping, unsubstantiated generalizations, which definitely makes his account of history occasionally "epic," but almost unfalsifiable as well. So sometimes it seems like McLuhan is just relabeling phenomena (this is a "hot" medium, this is a "cold" one) without performing much analysis, translating things into jargon without necessarily developing arguments.
Garber notes a recent essay by Paul Ford about the media's role in imposing narratives on the flux of events and regularizing time and points out that "If McLuhan is to be believed, the much-discussed and often-assumed human need for narrative — or, at least, our need for narrative that has explicit beginnings and endings — may be contingent rather than implicit." That is, the norms of our reading, or rather our media consumption generally, are shaped by existing levels of technology and how that technology is assimilated socially. We don't come hardwired with a love of stories, as literary humanists sometimes insist. Narrative conventions are always part of what society is always in the process of negotiating -- they are political, ideological, like just about every other kind of relation. McLuhan believed that new media forms would retribalize humanity, undoing some of the specific sorts of freedoms market society (which he links specifically to books and literacy) guaranteed and introducing different ways to construe it. The danger, as Garber implies, is that we will get swallowed by real time, which old media broke into manageable increments but which mew media has redissolved. This opens up possibilities of deliberate disorientation and unsustainable acceleration of consumption.
Anyway, I recently read McLuhan's Undertstanding Media and this is what I took away from it. The general gist is that print media support individualism and economistic rationality: "If Western literate man undergoes much dissociation of inner sensibility from his use of the alphabet, he also wins his personal freedom to dissociate himself from clan and family" (88). Literacy, in McLuhan's view, makes capitalist-style consumer markets possible: "Nonliterate societies are quite lacking in the psychic resources to create and sustain the enormous structures of statistical information that we call markets and prices.... The extreme abstraction and detachment represented by our pricing system is quite unthinkable and unusable amidst populations for whom the exciting drama of price haggling occurs with every transaction" (137). This ties in to the idea that humans must learn to be rational in an economic sense -- that such calculation is not inherent but socially constructed. Capitalist society (and its media) equips us with this form of reason during the process of subjectivation.
But the atomized, anonymized individuals of the literate world are prone to anomie, to being "massified." Whereas subsequent media (more immersive and real-time; accelerated) are returning culture dialectically to a more "tribal" orientation -- the "global village." We collectively try to defeat time by pursuing the instantaneousness of new media; this speed, this accelerated transience begins to undo economism in favor of some new collectivity. "Fragmented, literate and visual individualism is not possible in an electrically patterned and imploded society" (51). So it's obvious why the P2P types and the technoutopian futurists are attracted to McLuhan, who more or less established their rhetorical mode. But McLuhan occasionally issues some warnings about the mediated future as well. This, for example, seems like a prescient critique of the attention economy and recommendation engines:
And later he writes, "The avid desire of mankind to prostitute itself stands up against the chaos of revolution" (189). In other words, technology will be commercialized rather than become subversive.
McLuhan claims that "the effect of electric technology had at first been anxiety. Now it appears to create boredom" (26). That is, it exacerbates the paradoxes of choice, encourages us to suspend decision making for as long as possible, since switching among a newly vast array of alternatives appears easy. But such suspension, such switching may have hidden cognitive costs, may contribute to ego depletion. He points out how technology tends to accelerate exchange, noting that, for example, "by coordinating and accelerating human meetings and goings-on, clocks increase the sheer quantity of human exchange." This seems to be a structural fit with capitalism's need to maximize exchange to maximize opportunities to realize profit. Photographs, too, create a world of "accelerated transience" (196).
He also notes that certain technologies seek to make self-service labor possible, eliminating service requirements and prompting us to take on more responsibility for ourselves as a form of progress (36). That is, technology institutes convenience as a desirable value that trumps other values; ease and efficiency make collectivity appear progressively more annoying, a social ill to be eradicated in the name of individualist freedom, the only freedom that counts.
McLuhan anticipates the rise of immaterial labor, as "commodities themselves assume more and more the character of information" -- they become signifiers, bearers of design distinctions and lifestyle accents. "As electric information levels rise, almost any kind of material will serve any kind of need or function, forcing the intellectual more and more into the role of social command and into the service of production." Hence the rise of the "creative class" and the importance of social production, building brands and meanings and distributing them authoritatively. Manufacturing becomes a pretense for information, where the real profit margins are:
McLuhan insists that "the product matters less as the audience participation increases" -- that is because that participation is the product, the manufactured good, the pretense. "Any acceptable ad is a vigorous dramatization of communal experience," McLuhan claims (228); by this I think he might mean that ads plunge us into visceral experience of what Baudrillard calls the "code" of consumerism. McLuhan asserts that ads draw us into neotribal experiences of collectivity; I think this claim is undermined by the rise of personalization and design ideology. We collectively participate in the idea of customizing our consumer goods, but finding a unique angle on this common culture is the main avenue for hipster distinction. We craft our own niche for ourselves, and become anxious to isolate ourselves from others within the various constituencies brands create for themselves. Belonging to the communities facilitated by media products fosters a simultaneous tension to escape their embrace, o make one's participation singular. That is to say, media participation is as competitive as it is collaborative.
In the last chapter, McLuhan says this of the future of work:
This sounds a lot like the autonomist idea of the general intellect, which kicks in after automation becomes standard in industry. McLuhan's way of putting it: "Many people, in consequence, have begun to look on the whole of society as a single unified machine for creating wealth.... With electricity as energizer and synchronizer, all aspects of production, consumption, and organization become incidental to communications." He suggests that the only profession of the future will be teacher. We will be all teaching each other new ways to please and divert ourselves, new ways to want more things. Learning itself becomes "the principal form of production and consumption" (351). That sounds like a good thing, but one must factor in the ramifications of widespread, institutionalized narcissism, which leads us to become experts in one very particular subject: ourselves. When the alleged structural unemployment subsides, this is the sort of service economy we will be left with -- the full flowering of communicative capitalism. We are consigned by automation to industrialized, mass-produced individuality that we must never stop blathering about.
Garber notes a recent essay by Paul Ford about the media's role in imposing narratives on the flux of events and regularizing time and points out that "If McLuhan is to be believed, the much-discussed and often-assumed human need for narrative — or, at least, our need for narrative that has explicit beginnings and endings — may be contingent rather than implicit." That is, the norms of our reading, or rather our media consumption generally, are shaped by existing levels of technology and how that technology is assimilated socially. We don't come hardwired with a love of stories, as literary humanists sometimes insist. Narrative conventions are always part of what society is always in the process of negotiating -- they are political, ideological, like just about every other kind of relation. McLuhan believed that new media forms would retribalize humanity, undoing some of the specific sorts of freedoms market society (which he links specifically to books and literacy) guaranteed and introducing different ways to construe it. The danger, as Garber implies, is that we will get swallowed by real time, which old media broke into manageable increments but which mew media has redissolved. This opens up possibilities of deliberate disorientation and unsustainable acceleration of consumption.
Anyway, I recently read McLuhan's Undertstanding Media and this is what I took away from it. The general gist is that print media support individualism and economistic rationality: "If Western literate man undergoes much dissociation of inner sensibility from his use of the alphabet, he also wins his personal freedom to dissociate himself from clan and family" (88). Literacy, in McLuhan's view, makes capitalist-style consumer markets possible: "Nonliterate societies are quite lacking in the psychic resources to create and sustain the enormous structures of statistical information that we call markets and prices.... The extreme abstraction and detachment represented by our pricing system is quite unthinkable and unusable amidst populations for whom the exciting drama of price haggling occurs with every transaction" (137). This ties in to the idea that humans must learn to be rational in an economic sense -- that such calculation is not inherent but socially constructed. Capitalist society (and its media) equips us with this form of reason during the process of subjectivation.
But the atomized, anonymized individuals of the literate world are prone to anomie, to being "massified." Whereas subsequent media (more immersive and real-time; accelerated) are returning culture dialectically to a more "tribal" orientation -- the "global village." We collectively try to defeat time by pursuing the instantaneousness of new media; this speed, this accelerated transience begins to undo economism in favor of some new collectivity. "Fragmented, literate and visual individualism is not possible in an electrically patterned and imploded society" (51). So it's obvious why the P2P types and the technoutopian futurists are attracted to McLuhan, who more or less established their rhetorical mode. But McLuhan occasionally issues some warnings about the mediated future as well. This, for example, seems like a prescient critique of the attention economy and recommendation engines:
Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. (68)
And later he writes, "The avid desire of mankind to prostitute itself stands up against the chaos of revolution" (189). In other words, technology will be commercialized rather than become subversive.
McLuhan claims that "the effect of electric technology had at first been anxiety. Now it appears to create boredom" (26). That is, it exacerbates the paradoxes of choice, encourages us to suspend decision making for as long as possible, since switching among a newly vast array of alternatives appears easy. But such suspension, such switching may have hidden cognitive costs, may contribute to ego depletion. He points out how technology tends to accelerate exchange, noting that, for example, "by coordinating and accelerating human meetings and goings-on, clocks increase the sheer quantity of human exchange." This seems to be a structural fit with capitalism's need to maximize exchange to maximize opportunities to realize profit. Photographs, too, create a world of "accelerated transience" (196).
He also notes that certain technologies seek to make self-service labor possible, eliminating service requirements and prompting us to take on more responsibility for ourselves as a form of progress (36). That is, technology institutes convenience as a desirable value that trumps other values; ease and efficiency make collectivity appear progressively more annoying, a social ill to be eradicated in the name of individualist freedom, the only freedom that counts.
McLuhan anticipates the rise of immaterial labor, as "commodities themselves assume more and more the character of information" -- they become signifiers, bearers of design distinctions and lifestyle accents. "As electric information levels rise, almost any kind of material will serve any kind of need or function, forcing the intellectual more and more into the role of social command and into the service of production." Hence the rise of the "creative class" and the importance of social production, building brands and meanings and distributing them authoritatively. Manufacturing becomes a pretense for information, where the real profit margins are:
At the end of the mechanical age people still imagined that press and radio and even TV were merely forms of information paid for by the makers and users of "hardware," like cars and soap and gasoline. As automation takes hold, it becomes obvious that information is the crucial commodity, and that solid products are merely incidental to information movement. The early stages by which information itself became the basic economic commodity of the electric age were obscured by the ways in which advertising and entertainment put people off the track. Advertisers pay for space and time in paper and magazine, on radio and TV; that is, they buy a piece of the reader, listener, or viewer as definitely as if they hired our homes for a public meeting. They would gladly pay the reader, listener, or viewer directly for his time and attention if they knew how to do so. The only way so far devised is to put on a free show. Movies in America have not developed advertising intervals simply because the movie itself is the greatest of all forms of advertisement for consumer goods.
McLuhan insists that "the product matters less as the audience participation increases" -- that is because that participation is the product, the manufactured good, the pretense. "Any acceptable ad is a vigorous dramatization of communal experience," McLuhan claims (228); by this I think he might mean that ads plunge us into visceral experience of what Baudrillard calls the "code" of consumerism. McLuhan asserts that ads draw us into neotribal experiences of collectivity; I think this claim is undermined by the rise of personalization and design ideology. We collectively participate in the idea of customizing our consumer goods, but finding a unique angle on this common culture is the main avenue for hipster distinction. We craft our own niche for ourselves, and become anxious to isolate ourselves from others within the various constituencies brands create for themselves. Belonging to the communities facilitated by media products fosters a simultaneous tension to escape their embrace, o make one's participation singular. That is to say, media participation is as competitive as it is collaborative.
In the last chapter, McLuhan says this of the future of work:
The future of work consists of earning a living in the automation age. This is a familiar pattern in electric technology in general. It ends the old dichotomies between culture and technology, between art and commerce, and between work and leisure. Whereas in the mechanical age of fragmentation leisure had been the absence of work, or mere idleness, the reverse is true in the electric age. As the age of information demands the simultaneous use of all our faculties, we discover that we are most at leisure when we are most intensely involved, very much as with the artists in all ages.
This sounds a lot like the autonomist idea of the general intellect, which kicks in after automation becomes standard in industry. McLuhan's way of putting it: "Many people, in consequence, have begun to look on the whole of society as a single unified machine for creating wealth.... With electricity as energizer and synchronizer, all aspects of production, consumption, and organization become incidental to communications." He suggests that the only profession of the future will be teacher. We will be all teaching each other new ways to please and divert ourselves, new ways to want more things. Learning itself becomes "the principal form of production and consumption" (351). That sounds like a good thing, but one must factor in the ramifications of widespread, institutionalized narcissism, which leads us to become experts in one very particular subject: ourselves. When the alleged structural unemployment subsides, this is the sort of service economy we will be left with -- the full flowering of communicative capitalism. We are consigned by automation to industrialized, mass-produced individuality that we must never stop blathering about.
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:
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:
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.
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.And here's another post I wrote in April 2009 about the "gleefully frugal"
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.
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.
Jobless recoveries and productivity surges (22 June 2011)
Does the business community care about achieving full employment? Why would it? With a slack labor market, companies can drive workers harder, treat them poorly and cut their benefits as ruthlessly as if they were Greek citizens and the employees have no recourse. That's the essence of the recent Mother Jones article by Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery on the "great speedup" -- how companies are using improving productivity (a.k.a. working people much harder) to trim their payrolls and improve profits.
Why aren't we outraged? The authors suggest the American ideology of hard work and bootstrapping makes us particularly susceptible to drawing our self-esteem from overwork (maybe we all need to be reading Lafargue), though the weak labor-protection laws also play a part in helping corporations get away with limiting vacation time, sick pay, parental leave and so on. They point out that "productivity" is more or less a euphemism for extracting more labor from workers in shorter time periods, glossing over the reality of bosses sweating employees by evoking some magical technological fix. Sometimes we are lulled into thinking "productivity improvements" means people work just as hard as they ever were but more stuff is made, thanks to magic machines. Machines often permit workers to do more faster, but some innovations -- communication technology, for instance -- serve to conceal the extension of the working day and the intensiveness of workplace discipline. And in all cases, technological accelerants have a corresponding effect on workers, who must keep up with the machines and may experience increased stress as the managerial pressure mounts. The authors argue that we should organize and fight for more respite from this pressure in the form of increased vacation, work-sharing programs, and the like. Implicit is a sanction of the idea of a productivity freeze, anathema to the traditional economic view that quality of life improves with productivity. Does that calculus shift when productivity yields persistent unemployment and corporate looting of labor's share of the gains from productivity? Perhaps capitalists believe fundamentally that labor doesn't deserve a share -- that seems to be the de facto position of the Republican party.
At his blog, Jared Bernstein has more on the slack labor market, with charts intended to demonstrate that "the diminished ability to bargain for their fair share of productivity growth is a major factor in the productivity/income split. You may think I’m talking unions here, but I’m not. I’m talking high unemployment." Lane Kenworthy, in his recent has a post about jobless recoveries, argues that data from recent recessions reveals that the "pattern of the 2000-07 business cycle may indicate a fundamental shift in employer practices, with greater reluctance to hire and eagerness to fire," citing this 2010 paper (pdf) by Robert Gordon about the apparent demise of Okun's Law, which associates growth with falling unemployment. Gordon claims that the data show that "the concept of a procyclical 'productivity shock' and 'technology shock' is no longer relevant, except in reference to particular major changes in the relative price of oil or other commodities" and surveys some of the other explanations for "structural labor‐market change." This one was particularly comforting:
But the overarching point of all these articles is that economic growth is not benefiting society as a whole but a smaller class of capitalists and rentiers -- and this appears to be by design, if you buy the story outlined here by Robert Reich (short video). The top 1% of the income distribution controls government, forcing it to pursue policies of austerity rather than those designed to improve employment, because the top 1%, shortsightedly or not, doesn't care about unemployed people, and in fact, can exploit them more ruthlessly the more desperate they are. And politicians don't care about them because constituents are easily demagogued into agreeing with the paymaster's political program. There is no apparent possible consensus, because the 1%ers behave as though improving society for all saps their wealth in zero-sum fashion. Meanwhile, the quality of life for the middle class erodes, government services are cut indiscriminately, and we slouch toward becoming a banana republic.
In all the chatter about our "jobless recovery," how often does someone explain the simple feat by which this is actually accomplished? US productivity increased twice as fast in 2009 as it had in 2008, and twice as fast again in 2010: workforce down, output up, and voilá! No wonder corporate profits are up 22 percent since 2007, according to a new report by the Economic Policy Institute. To repeat: Up. Twenty-two. Percent.
Why aren't we outraged? The authors suggest the American ideology of hard work and bootstrapping makes us particularly susceptible to drawing our self-esteem from overwork (maybe we all need to be reading Lafargue), though the weak labor-protection laws also play a part in helping corporations get away with limiting vacation time, sick pay, parental leave and so on. They point out that "productivity" is more or less a euphemism for extracting more labor from workers in shorter time periods, glossing over the reality of bosses sweating employees by evoking some magical technological fix. Sometimes we are lulled into thinking "productivity improvements" means people work just as hard as they ever were but more stuff is made, thanks to magic machines. Machines often permit workers to do more faster, but some innovations -- communication technology, for instance -- serve to conceal the extension of the working day and the intensiveness of workplace discipline. And in all cases, technological accelerants have a corresponding effect on workers, who must keep up with the machines and may experience increased stress as the managerial pressure mounts. The authors argue that we should organize and fight for more respite from this pressure in the form of increased vacation, work-sharing programs, and the like. Implicit is a sanction of the idea of a productivity freeze, anathema to the traditional economic view that quality of life improves with productivity. Does that calculus shift when productivity yields persistent unemployment and corporate looting of labor's share of the gains from productivity? Perhaps capitalists believe fundamentally that labor doesn't deserve a share -- that seems to be the de facto position of the Republican party.
At his blog, Jared Bernstein has more on the slack labor market, with charts intended to demonstrate that "the diminished ability to bargain for their fair share of productivity growth is a major factor in the productivity/income split. You may think I’m talking unions here, but I’m not. I’m talking high unemployment." Lane Kenworthy, in his recent has a post about jobless recoveries, argues that data from recent recessions reveals that the "pattern of the 2000-07 business cycle may indicate a fundamental shift in employer practices, with greater reluctance to hire and eagerness to fire," citing this 2010 paper (pdf) by Robert Gordon about the apparent demise of Okun's Law, which associates growth with falling unemployment. Gordon claims that the data show that "the concept of a procyclical 'productivity shock' and 'technology shock' is no longer relevant, except in reference to particular major changes in the relative price of oil or other commodities" and surveys some of the other explanations for "structural labor‐market change." This one was particularly comforting:
Firms can reduce employment and hours with impunity if they no longer value the human capital embodied in their experienced workers and have confidence that via the internet they can find replacement employees with equivalent skills, and an ability to learn rapidly the necessary specific human capital to function well on the job.In yesterday's post I was trying to make the case that internships are an exact reflection of this growing confidence. When jobs become a matter of harnessing the general intellect of the multitude, the individual nodes of the rhizome are interchangeable. Specific skills have become less important than general malleability, so there is no need to keep the same people around or show loyalty to employees to build organizational capital. More and more of us become, to use the term Gordon adopts, "disposable workers." The internet is exacerbating this process not only by making it easier to recruit fresh meat, but also by allowing capital to subsume more and more of everyday life, rendering more of production social (that is, a by-product of subjectivity formation and sociality in general). This polarizes the labor market further into superstars with irreplaceable skills in producing affects (the celebrities whose lives make the other commodities they associate with valuable, and the entertainers who more dependably stimulate us) and the rest of us proles who make up the wisdom of crowds.
But the overarching point of all these articles is that economic growth is not benefiting society as a whole but a smaller class of capitalists and rentiers -- and this appears to be by design, if you buy the story outlined here by Robert Reich (short video). The top 1% of the income distribution controls government, forcing it to pursue policies of austerity rather than those designed to improve employment, because the top 1%, shortsightedly or not, doesn't care about unemployed people, and in fact, can exploit them more ruthlessly the more desperate they are. And politicians don't care about them because constituents are easily demagogued into agreeing with the paymaster's political program. There is no apparent possible consensus, because the 1%ers behave as though improving society for all saps their wealth in zero-sum fashion. Meanwhile, the quality of life for the middle class erodes, government services are cut indiscriminately, and we slouch toward becoming a banana republic.
Thoughts on Ross Perlin's 'Intern Nation' (21 June 2011)
Many of the reviews of Ross Perlin's recent book Intern Nation seem to be marked by a relief that someone else has taken the trouble to acknowledge (i.e. done all they can realistically be expected to do to solve) an obvious problem -- that interns are like strike-breakers before the fact, except they work not for compromisingly low wages so much as for the privilege of sucking up to bosses and building all-important white-collar social capital (here are two reviews that buck the trend). Employers in certain fields, ones that can establish a nominally plausible but essentially simoniac relationship with universities, can take advantage of loopholes in the U.S. labor protection laws to eliminate full-time positions and hire students as underpaid temps to do the work.
Once, this was restricted mainly to the "glamor industries" -- a situation well-condemned in a Baffler article from 1999 by Jim Frederick (sadly not online, Google books preview here). In the past decade, internships have spread throughout the postindustrial sectors of the economy, so that a period of corvée labor in service to the managerial overlords in corporate America is now simply programmed into the college experience for most privileged kids. Many intern programs are a racket geared not toward democratizing economic opportunity but conserving privilege through nepotistic mechanisms, and the ones that aren't about ensuring that the children of elites meet suitable mentors are typically schemes for offloading as much menial work as possible onto unpaid laborers who have no recourse to legal protections.
Not that anyone should have been surprised by this situation. If you have ever worked in offices or even watched TV shows about working in offices, how can you be surprised that internships aren't especially educational? Or that companies are eager to gain leverage over workers however they can? Does anyone think businesses would do anything but exploit interns as long as they can get away with it? And does anyone think labor-law enforcement is anywhere close to being a priority for the series of neoliberal administrations the U.S. has endured since Reagan? Reviewers least of all should have been surprised, as most of the publications use interns unapolegetically and some of the reviewers admit to having been interns themselves. Presumably they see their own experience as an exception to the general rule of exploitation and the conservation of privilege to those with connections. Internships in general might clearly seem exploitative, eviscerating hard-earned rights for workers, but one's own internship always isn't so bad and gives a necessary leg up, lets you meet some really nice, really useful people.
But if you find internships problematic enough to hail a book like this, then you should be concerned about the collective action problem that perpetuates the system -- the individualistic ethos of interns that prompts them to participate in an obviously corrupt system so that they can get the edge on their competitors in the labor market. Such an attitude is the outcome of an extended effort by employers and universities to normalize the abuse of internships as pseudo-educational training programs (in his book, Perlin effectively traces this), which in turn is part of the larger sweep of neoliberal reform, which is intended to accustom individual workers to a dog-eat-dog capitalist world and get them to shoulder more and more social risk personally. Under neoliberalism, individuals need to live as though there is no social safety net, that they are perpetually vulnerable to bad fortune and thus accrue as much unfair advantage over others as they can as a form of private insurance. Internships are merely among the first steps in this dismal education process.
Perhaps the intended audience for the book is college students who might consider becoming an intern themselves. Such an audience would be appropriate, because the most straight-forward way to derail internship abuses would be to incite a general refusal among college-age workers to accept employment on those terms. Given the competitive realities of the labor market, however, such a turn of events seems extremely unlikely. Instead, internships acclimate those entering the workforce to the realities of at-will employment, which requires that employees perpetually exceed expectations and assume personal responsibility for developing the necessary strategies for success within the firm. To train interns in a set of procedures agreed upon in advance would undermine the whole purpose of internships for most enterprises; internships serve as a elaborate test to see if the interns can invent ways to make themselves useful. If you have to tell them how to be useful, they are not being trained in the realities of the workplace, which necessarily puts a premium on self-starting and solving problems for oneself in the course of the working day (which contributes to overall efficiency and productivity). Thus rote obedience is often less important for interns than being the sort of worker who can intuit ways to be useful through careful observation and open-ended obsequiousness. With the overriding imperative of making a good impression guiding them, successful interns master ways of sussing out the office power-brokers, sidling up to bosses, getting themselves heard in meetings despite their novitiate status, and so on. They create their own opportunities and are paid in goodwill (much like bloggers).
Perlin recognizes the place of internships in the "new spirit of capitalism" (to use Boltanski and Chiapello's phrase as he does), arguing that they represent the evolution of training programs to suit post-Fordist work conditions: "What structured training programs were to the bureaucratic firms of the mid-20th century, internships may well be to the new network capitalism of firms dealing with intangible goods." Modern production in many sectors has less to do with learning industry-specific skills that require focused apprenticeship. Instead, much of production has become social, as Tiziana Terranova explains in this talk. That is to say, production is less a matter of skilled labor than of what is sometimes called immaterial labor -- the ability to collaborate, cooperate and innovate, often in consumption processes, to enrich the symbolic value of commodities. Perlin notes that this serves to justify office internships as de facto training, no matter how menial the intern's actual jobs seem on the surface. "To an economist, the logic goes like this: if white-collar firms are increasingly organized around their intangible human or organizational capital—whether it be their brand or their 'culture of innovation'— then this is what interns have to learn, just as much as any specific skill set."
That sounds a lot like what post-autonomist theory has to say about post-Fordist labor conditions. In Grammar of the Multitude, Paolo Virno describes this shift in labor from away from skills and toward congeniality and what he calls "virtuosity" -- work as ambitiously performative. Often this is a matter of innovating your own work processes, writing your own job description (as the management gurus might put it), finding opportunities to schmooze and impress higher-ups with useful ideas. Virno:
So it is that internships habituate novice employees to the conditions of the contemporary workplace, where job-specific skills are less relevant than the willingness to cooperate totally with co-workers and managers and make a show of one's perpetual availability and malleability. Much of career training for the postindustrial labor market involves learning to be a weasel, to be one of the cheese-hunting rats of the megaselling 1990s management tract Who Moved My Cheese? Interns learn to become eager self-exploiters. They accept that employers owe no such entitlements as loyalty to employees (superior employees earn favors; all workers shouldn't unfairly be granted rights uniformly); instead the constant demand for self-reinvention is inscribed as an opportunity for self-development, as an investment in one's own "human capital," though ultimately for the company's benefit.
Or to put it in Marxist terms, interns are taught to assimilate to the "general intellect," the wellspring of social productivity that Marx prophesized in the Grundrisse's "Fragment on Machines," and deploy it for capital's advantage. This manifests as an eagerness to show what one can do, to show what one is made of, to show how eager one is -- to show, in short, the quality of one's subjectivity in total and how well that total being can suits the company's needs. "Labor as subjectivity," as Virno, citing Marx, puts it. Interns are given the opportunity to prove that they are well-socialized and have the habitus of the go-getting office worker (or the chance to absorb that habitus quickly). Interns thus develop an entrepreneurial attitude toward their own capabilities and their everyday lives, scouring it all for opportunities to exploit for an employer's sake. Individuals not fortunate enough to inherit it are responsible for equipping themselves with "human capital."
But does this constitute real training? Perlin thinks it doesn't, which would make internships illegal. But enforcing that law wouldn't change the underlying conditions that require that workers adopt such a habitus, which means that interns' legality is something of a sideshow. Whether you are an intern or a mandatory freelancer, the situation is pretty much the same -- you have to constantly hustle. As Perlin notes, the need to supply oneself with human capital (rather than have it be a part of what society supplies to all its members out of an egalitarianism of opportunity) exemplifies how a broadening precarity affects the middle class, rendering its isolated members as responsible for outfitting themselves for social survival as the poor have long been. When internships fall to the nonelites, it still reflects this basic structure, that the intern should be willing to work for nothing because it is an investment in their future. Likewise, secondary education is entirely instrumental, an investment in one's future earning potential rather than an enrichment of one's human capabilities. Though skeptical of the human-capital thesis, Perlin tends to accept this view tacitly, seeing education basically as a mechanism for generating a wage premium.
Perlin's book concludes with a somewhat wide-eyed "Intern Bill of Rights" -- a series of propositions for creating a "common standard by which to evaluate and improve internships." The list seems to suggest that much of the problem with internships is semantic -- the word itself sugarcoats the reality of exploitation with educational pretenses. But why attempt to stabilize a definition of the word? It would seem more constructive to sully the term completely, along with the other euphemisms of the internship racket, like "human capital" and "situated learning," that serve only as tools of opportunistic obfuscation. Under the conditions Perlin advocates in this list, interns are part-time workers, plain and simple, and should be labeled as such. Those in positions that fail to meet those standards he elucidates are best understood as illegals, as scabs, regardless of how prestigious or entitled their upbringing has been. Fighting internships means fighting special favors, denying the personal touches, the exceptionalism of elite colleges -- it means confronting privilege head on and exposing it with contempt. But what we tend to do instead is take advantage of new tools to measure our prestige and figure out ways to leverage it into enduring privileges for ourselves and our friends.
Once, this was restricted mainly to the "glamor industries" -- a situation well-condemned in a Baffler article from 1999 by Jim Frederick (sadly not online, Google books preview here). In the past decade, internships have spread throughout the postindustrial sectors of the economy, so that a period of corvée labor in service to the managerial overlords in corporate America is now simply programmed into the college experience for most privileged kids. Many intern programs are a racket geared not toward democratizing economic opportunity but conserving privilege through nepotistic mechanisms, and the ones that aren't about ensuring that the children of elites meet suitable mentors are typically schemes for offloading as much menial work as possible onto unpaid laborers who have no recourse to legal protections.
Not that anyone should have been surprised by this situation. If you have ever worked in offices or even watched TV shows about working in offices, how can you be surprised that internships aren't especially educational? Or that companies are eager to gain leverage over workers however they can? Does anyone think businesses would do anything but exploit interns as long as they can get away with it? And does anyone think labor-law enforcement is anywhere close to being a priority for the series of neoliberal administrations the U.S. has endured since Reagan? Reviewers least of all should have been surprised, as most of the publications use interns unapolegetically and some of the reviewers admit to having been interns themselves. Presumably they see their own experience as an exception to the general rule of exploitation and the conservation of privilege to those with connections. Internships in general might clearly seem exploitative, eviscerating hard-earned rights for workers, but one's own internship always isn't so bad and gives a necessary leg up, lets you meet some really nice, really useful people.
But if you find internships problematic enough to hail a book like this, then you should be concerned about the collective action problem that perpetuates the system -- the individualistic ethos of interns that prompts them to participate in an obviously corrupt system so that they can get the edge on their competitors in the labor market. Such an attitude is the outcome of an extended effort by employers and universities to normalize the abuse of internships as pseudo-educational training programs (in his book, Perlin effectively traces this), which in turn is part of the larger sweep of neoliberal reform, which is intended to accustom individual workers to a dog-eat-dog capitalist world and get them to shoulder more and more social risk personally. Under neoliberalism, individuals need to live as though there is no social safety net, that they are perpetually vulnerable to bad fortune and thus accrue as much unfair advantage over others as they can as a form of private insurance. Internships are merely among the first steps in this dismal education process.
Perhaps the intended audience for the book is college students who might consider becoming an intern themselves. Such an audience would be appropriate, because the most straight-forward way to derail internship abuses would be to incite a general refusal among college-age workers to accept employment on those terms. Given the competitive realities of the labor market, however, such a turn of events seems extremely unlikely. Instead, internships acclimate those entering the workforce to the realities of at-will employment, which requires that employees perpetually exceed expectations and assume personal responsibility for developing the necessary strategies for success within the firm. To train interns in a set of procedures agreed upon in advance would undermine the whole purpose of internships for most enterprises; internships serve as a elaborate test to see if the interns can invent ways to make themselves useful. If you have to tell them how to be useful, they are not being trained in the realities of the workplace, which necessarily puts a premium on self-starting and solving problems for oneself in the course of the working day (which contributes to overall efficiency and productivity). Thus rote obedience is often less important for interns than being the sort of worker who can intuit ways to be useful through careful observation and open-ended obsequiousness. With the overriding imperative of making a good impression guiding them, successful interns master ways of sussing out the office power-brokers, sidling up to bosses, getting themselves heard in meetings despite their novitiate status, and so on. They create their own opportunities and are paid in goodwill (much like bloggers).
Perlin recognizes the place of internships in the "new spirit of capitalism" (to use Boltanski and Chiapello's phrase as he does), arguing that they represent the evolution of training programs to suit post-Fordist work conditions: "What structured training programs were to the bureaucratic firms of the mid-20th century, internships may well be to the new network capitalism of firms dealing with intangible goods." Modern production in many sectors has less to do with learning industry-specific skills that require focused apprenticeship. Instead, much of production has become social, as Tiziana Terranova explains in this talk. That is to say, production is less a matter of skilled labor than of what is sometimes called immaterial labor -- the ability to collaborate, cooperate and innovate, often in consumption processes, to enrich the symbolic value of commodities. Perlin notes that this serves to justify office internships as de facto training, no matter how menial the intern's actual jobs seem on the surface. "To an economist, the logic goes like this: if white-collar firms are increasingly organized around their intangible human or organizational capital—whether it be their brand or their 'culture of innovation'— then this is what interns have to learn, just as much as any specific skill set."
That sounds a lot like what post-autonomist theory has to say about post-Fordist labor conditions. In Grammar of the Multitude, Paolo Virno describes this shift in labor from away from skills and toward congeniality and what he calls "virtuosity" -- work as ambitiously performative. Often this is a matter of innovating your own work processes, writing your own job description (as the management gurus might put it), finding opportunities to schmooze and impress higher-ups with useful ideas. Virno:
the tasks of a worker or of a clerk no longer involve the completion of a single particular assignment, but the changing and intensifying of social cooperation.... From the beginning, one resource of capitalistic enterprise has been the so-called “misappropriation of workers’ know how.” That is to say: when workers found a way to execute their labor with less effort, taking an extra break, etc., the corporate hierarchy took advantage of this minimal victory, knowing it was happening, in order to modify the organization of labor. In my opinion, a significant change takes place when the task of the worker or of the clerk to some extent consists in actually finding, in discovering expedients, “tricks,” solutions which ameliorate the organization of labor. In the latter case, workers’ knowledge is not used on the sly but it is requested explicitly; that is to say, it becomes one of the stipulated working assignments. The same change takes place, in fact, with regards to cooperation: it is not the same thing if workers are coordinated de facto by the engineer or if they are asked to invent and produce new cooperative procedures. Instead of remaining in the background, the act of cooperating, linguistic integration, comes to the very foreground.This is essentially what internships are about. As Perlin notes, "the whole point of internships" is that the untrained worker must "come in under the radar, on the cheap, just a bright kid, and then suddenly prove yourself, become somebody worth having." Internships are precisely about teaching interns that they must train themselves and prove their fitness through quick adaptability. The point of most contemporary internships is not what sort of work gets assigned to interns and what specific training they receive from mentors but rather how quickly they learn to create productive work for themselves that their employers can then profit from. Many interns are tacitly expected to figure out how to go beyond what they have been explicitly been directed to do and pitch their own ideas for what they can do.
So it is that internships habituate novice employees to the conditions of the contemporary workplace, where job-specific skills are less relevant than the willingness to cooperate totally with co-workers and managers and make a show of one's perpetual availability and malleability. Much of career training for the postindustrial labor market involves learning to be a weasel, to be one of the cheese-hunting rats of the megaselling 1990s management tract Who Moved My Cheese? Interns learn to become eager self-exploiters. They accept that employers owe no such entitlements as loyalty to employees (superior employees earn favors; all workers shouldn't unfairly be granted rights uniformly); instead the constant demand for self-reinvention is inscribed as an opportunity for self-development, as an investment in one's own "human capital," though ultimately for the company's benefit.
Or to put it in Marxist terms, interns are taught to assimilate to the "general intellect," the wellspring of social productivity that Marx prophesized in the Grundrisse's "Fragment on Machines," and deploy it for capital's advantage. This manifests as an eagerness to show what one can do, to show what one is made of, to show how eager one is -- to show, in short, the quality of one's subjectivity in total and how well that total being can suits the company's needs. "Labor as subjectivity," as Virno, citing Marx, puts it. Interns are given the opportunity to prove that they are well-socialized and have the habitus of the go-getting office worker (or the chance to absorb that habitus quickly). Interns thus develop an entrepreneurial attitude toward their own capabilities and their everyday lives, scouring it all for opportunities to exploit for an employer's sake. Individuals not fortunate enough to inherit it are responsible for equipping themselves with "human capital."
But does this constitute real training? Perlin thinks it doesn't, which would make internships illegal. But enforcing that law wouldn't change the underlying conditions that require that workers adopt such a habitus, which means that interns' legality is something of a sideshow. Whether you are an intern or a mandatory freelancer, the situation is pretty much the same -- you have to constantly hustle. As Perlin notes, the need to supply oneself with human capital (rather than have it be a part of what society supplies to all its members out of an egalitarianism of opportunity) exemplifies how a broadening precarity affects the middle class, rendering its isolated members as responsible for outfitting themselves for social survival as the poor have long been. When internships fall to the nonelites, it still reflects this basic structure, that the intern should be willing to work for nothing because it is an investment in their future. Likewise, secondary education is entirely instrumental, an investment in one's future earning potential rather than an enrichment of one's human capabilities. Though skeptical of the human-capital thesis, Perlin tends to accept this view tacitly, seeing education basically as a mechanism for generating a wage premium.
Perlin's book concludes with a somewhat wide-eyed "Intern Bill of Rights" -- a series of propositions for creating a "common standard by which to evaluate and improve internships." The list seems to suggest that much of the problem with internships is semantic -- the word itself sugarcoats the reality of exploitation with educational pretenses. But why attempt to stabilize a definition of the word? It would seem more constructive to sully the term completely, along with the other euphemisms of the internship racket, like "human capital" and "situated learning," that serve only as tools of opportunistic obfuscation. Under the conditions Perlin advocates in this list, interns are part-time workers, plain and simple, and should be labeled as such. Those in positions that fail to meet those standards he elucidates are best understood as illegals, as scabs, regardless of how prestigious or entitled their upbringing has been. Fighting internships means fighting special favors, denying the personal touches, the exceptionalism of elite colleges -- it means confronting privilege head on and exposing it with contempt. But what we tend to do instead is take advantage of new tools to measure our prestige and figure out ways to leverage it into enduring privileges for ourselves and our friends.
Deficit deceit and the rentier class (10 June 2011)
It drives me a little crazy when I read any kind of reporting or polling on the U.S. deficit and all the phony concern people feel obliged to exhibit about it. It's a bit like when people complain about how many thousands of dollars a baseball player gets paid per at bat or something -- that fact that we know about it to complain is testimony to why the player deserves it. Fears about the deficit size has nothing to do with any impact it will have on most ordinary people and everything to do with media coverage of big numbers and the admonitory tone that is reflexively adopted. Matt Yglesias linked to an image that gets at the problem; it depicts a van covered in anti-abortion and anti-debt-limit-raising slogans. Yglesias writes, "It’s a problem for the country when strong emotional and ideological views about abortion get intimately linked in people’s ideas with views about much more technical questions about the merits of raising the debt ceiling or whether we have too much inflation or too little." When these things are lumped together, it means that both have become subject to demagoguery and tribalism, about winning at the expense of enemies, who in the case of the deficit are wholly imagined.
The losers in the deficit-reduction scenarios being worked out in Washington are basically everyone who is not a rentier, as this recent Krugman column argues: "Consciously or not, policy makers are catering almost exclusively to the interests of rentiers — those who derive lots of income from assets, who lent large sums of money in the past, often unwisely, but are now being protected from loss at everyone else’s expense." Who, exactly, are the rentiers? Krugman has some data here. He concludes that "it’s very much about benefits to the wealthy versus benefits to the middle class."
Krugman is elucidating a case made by Robert Kuttner in this essay (pdf) for the American Prospect, which inspired Mike Konczal to do some good analysis here and assemble a bunch of useful links here. Kuttner's basic point is that debt politics is about protecting previous creditors from accepting any losses (full repayment, despite the risk premium they had already been earning as interest) and protecting them from inflation, which reduces the value of their claims. (An argument for why inflation -- most obviously wage inflation -- would help most of us here.) Here's how Konczal puts it, in the context of the financial sector's recent recovery in profits (while the rest of the economy sputters):
At Interfluidty, Steve Randy Waldman points out that big banks become rentiers because of implicit government guarantees that they won't be allowed to fail. Those guarantees in turn are perpetuated by bankers' outsize influence in politics:
Rentiers always argue from their interests that austerity is necessary and whip up support for their position with a bunch of misleading rhetoric about how reduced debt generates economic confidence that encourages business owners to expand and hire. There's not much evidence to support this idea; the recent experiment with austerity in the UK suggests that ruthless budget cutting removes demand from the economy by impoverishing everyone but the rentiers, and this stifles growth across the board. Everyone loses, not just the people who were once supposedly "winning" by benefiting from spendthrift government bureaucrats and their allegedly indefensible spending programs. But that doesn't prevent the idea from taking hold among regular voters, who are presumably seduced by the fallacious logic of budget cutting as inherently virtuous, as though government debt and personal debt were analogous (they aren't) and as if debt is a moral failing (it's not, especially in an economy that explicitly relies on entrepreneurialism).
No one who is not living entirely on bondholdings -- no one who has to work -- should be rooting for austerity or bothering at all with deficit worries. Such worries are not really their worries; they are the transferred worries of elites who need to manipulate voters to protect their financial interests and their privilege in a democracy.
Konczal linked to this 1943 article by Michael Kalecki, "Political Aspects of Full Employment," which serves as a useful reminder about what is at stake in austerity debates -- not fiscal responsibility or the insecure future of welfare spending but labor discipline:
But capitalists are always fighting a two-front war in democracies, against workers and against their representatives in the government, who might begin to change the social framework to give workers more bargaining power. Capitalism is predicated on the asymmetries of power, on capital's ability to compel workers to sell their labor power. Capitalists must fight anything that threatens that imbalance, regardless of whether it leads to an aggregate increase of social wealth or even improves their individual profits.
UPDATE: In this post Yglesias links to a paper called “Financialization, Rentier Interests, and Central Bank Policy” (pdf) which describes central bank policy as serving the interests of keeping asset prices stable rather than raising employment levels. As Yglesias puts it: "For all the rising salience of goldbug cranks whining about fiat money, the Fed has hardly been indifferent to the potential for monetary expansion. It’s just that the goal of monetary expansion has been to do just enough to stabilize financial asset prices without going far enough to produce catch-up growth in the labor market.
What’s more, from the point of view of capital maybe it’s better not to catch up. As long as growth is positive and unemployment isn’t rising then maintaining a large 8-9% of the labor force out of work could be a useful tool of wage restraint."
Not to be too functionalist about it, but it often seems like a good idea to work backward from the need for labor discipline to understand certain vagaries of economic policy; at the level of policy and not individual firms, class struggle and getting leverage over workers matters more than efficiency or profit or even growth.
The losers in the deficit-reduction scenarios being worked out in Washington are basically everyone who is not a rentier, as this recent Krugman column argues: "Consciously or not, policy makers are catering almost exclusively to the interests of rentiers — those who derive lots of income from assets, who lent large sums of money in the past, often unwisely, but are now being protected from loss at everyone else’s expense." Who, exactly, are the rentiers? Krugman has some data here. He concludes that "it’s very much about benefits to the wealthy versus benefits to the middle class."
Krugman is elucidating a case made by Robert Kuttner in this essay (pdf) for the American Prospect, which inspired Mike Konczal to do some good analysis here and assemble a bunch of useful links here. Kuttner's basic point is that debt politics is about protecting previous creditors from accepting any losses (full repayment, despite the risk premium they had already been earning as interest) and protecting them from inflation, which reduces the value of their claims. (An argument for why inflation -- most obviously wage inflation -- would help most of us here.) Here's how Konczal puts it, in the context of the financial sector's recent recovery in profits (while the rest of the economy sputters):
Whatever you think of the financial sector being that profitable, it is important to remember what those post-crisis profits represent. Those profits aren’t the reward for effectively allocating capital to a recovering economy. The financial sector actually did a terrible job of that in the past decade. And capital isn’t being allocated anyway. Much of the capital in the economy is sitting on the balance sheets of banks and large corporations.
These profits are based off milking the bad debts of the housing and credit bubbles while Americans struggling under a crushing debt load. Instead of sharing the losses, the financial sector has locked itself into the profit stream and left the real economy to deal with the mess. These profits reflect, in Kuttner’s excellent phrasing, the claims of the past, not the potential of the future.
At Interfluidty, Steve Randy Waldman points out that big banks become rentiers because of implicit government guarantees that they won't be allowed to fail. Those guarantees in turn are perpetuated by bankers' outsize influence in politics:
when we modified accounting standards to eliminate the risk that bad loans on the books would translate to failures, when we funded their recapitalization on the sly, we changed banks. We transformed them from nervous debtors into pure rentiers, who see a lot more upside in squeezing borrowers than in eliminating a crippling debt overhang. And since banks are, shall we say, not entirely disenfranchised among policymakers, we increased the difficulty of making policy that includes accommodations between creditors and debtors, accommodations that permit the economy to move forward rather than stare back over its shoulder, nervously and greedily, at a gigantic pile of old debt.As a result, politicians serve banks' interests and unemployment starts to be regarded as a permanent feature of the economic landscape, unfortunate but "structural" and not at all related to the suffocating claims of the rentier class.
Rentiers always argue from their interests that austerity is necessary and whip up support for their position with a bunch of misleading rhetoric about how reduced debt generates economic confidence that encourages business owners to expand and hire. There's not much evidence to support this idea; the recent experiment with austerity in the UK suggests that ruthless budget cutting removes demand from the economy by impoverishing everyone but the rentiers, and this stifles growth across the board. Everyone loses, not just the people who were once supposedly "winning" by benefiting from spendthrift government bureaucrats and their allegedly indefensible spending programs. But that doesn't prevent the idea from taking hold among regular voters, who are presumably seduced by the fallacious logic of budget cutting as inherently virtuous, as though government debt and personal debt were analogous (they aren't) and as if debt is a moral failing (it's not, especially in an economy that explicitly relies on entrepreneurialism).
No one who is not living entirely on bondholdings -- no one who has to work -- should be rooting for austerity or bothering at all with deficit worries. Such worries are not really their worries; they are the transferred worries of elites who need to manipulate voters to protect their financial interests and their privilege in a democracy.
Konczal linked to this 1943 article by Michael Kalecki, "Political Aspects of Full Employment," which serves as a useful reminder about what is at stake in austerity debates -- not fiscal responsibility or the insecure future of welfare spending but labor discipline:
One might expect business leaders and their experts to be more in favour of subsidising mass consumption (by means of family allowances, subsidies to keep down the prices of necessities, etc.) than of public investment; for by subsidizing consumption the government would not be embarking on any sort of enterprise. In practice, however, this is not the case. Indeed, subsidizing mass consumption is much more violently opposed by these experts than public investment. For here a moral principle of the highest importance is at stake. The fundamentals of capitalist ethics require that 'you shall earn your bread in sweat' -- unless you happen to have private means.... The maintenance of full employment would cause social and political changes which would give a new impetus to the opposition of the business leaders. Indeed, under a regime of permanent full employment, the 'sack' would cease to play its role as a 'disciplinary measure. The social position of the boss would be undermined, and the self-assurance and class-consciousness of the working class would grow. Strikes for wage increases and improvements in conditions of work would create political tension. It is true that profits would be higher under a regime of full employment than they are on the average under laissez-faire, and even the rise in wage rates resulting from the stronger bargaining power of the workers is less likely to reduce profits than to increase prices, and thus adversely affects only the rentier interests. But 'discipline in the factories' and 'political stability' are more appreciated than profits by business leaders. Their class instinct tells them that lasting full employment is unsound from their point of view, and that unemployment is an integral part of the 'normal' capitalist system.This seems more true than ever with "factory discipline" dissolved for many workers into post-Fordist arrangements of self-exploitation. Independent "free agents" and flexible workers have even less bargaining power and less of a basis for solidarity, less grounds to demand their share of profits earned from the increased productivity that has come from workers' devoting ever more time to work -- from all aspects of everyday life, in effect, becoming work, as consumption becomes a mode of immaterial production.
But capitalists are always fighting a two-front war in democracies, against workers and against their representatives in the government, who might begin to change the social framework to give workers more bargaining power. Capitalism is predicated on the asymmetries of power, on capital's ability to compel workers to sell their labor power. Capitalists must fight anything that threatens that imbalance, regardless of whether it leads to an aggregate increase of social wealth or even improves their individual profits.
UPDATE: In this post Yglesias links to a paper called “Financialization, Rentier Interests, and Central Bank Policy” (pdf) which describes central bank policy as serving the interests of keeping asset prices stable rather than raising employment levels. As Yglesias puts it: "For all the rising salience of goldbug cranks whining about fiat money, the Fed has hardly been indifferent to the potential for monetary expansion. It’s just that the goal of monetary expansion has been to do just enough to stabilize financial asset prices without going far enough to produce catch-up growth in the labor market.
What’s more, from the point of view of capital maybe it’s better not to catch up. As long as growth is positive and unemployment isn’t rising then maintaining a large 8-9% of the labor force out of work could be a useful tool of wage restraint."
Not to be too functionalist about it, but it often seems like a good idea to work backward from the need for labor discipline to understand certain vagaries of economic policy; at the level of policy and not individual firms, class struggle and getting leverage over workers matters more than efficiency or profit or even growth.
Work Refusal (25 May 2011)
I spent the past weekend at the Post/Autonomia conference, which, fittingly enough, mostly took place in a former anatomical pathology laboratory -- the sessions were held in a room that was apparently once a morgue. At first, I was afraid that the ideas we were about to discuss (derived principally from autonomist writers like Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzaurato, Mario Tronti, John Holloway, Harry Cleaver, etc.) were possibly coming there to die, but I left feeling much more optimistic about the possibility that concepts like precarity and affective labor and decolonialization can escape the lab and actually be effectual in social activism.
Discussions ran the gamut from hairsplitting (to the untrained non-Spinozan) philosophical discussions of ontological accumulation and being-as-becoming to more hard-core Marxist themes like the composition of the working class, the organic composition of capital, and who comprises the revolutionary agent of history to practical assessments of the efficacy of, say, social media to activate the "multitude" (or, if you prefer, to sustain the Badiouian "communist hypothesis"), and it ended with a discussion of whether academia was at all a useful place for the discussion of any of this or whether it was fatally subsumed by capital. (I contributed a paper about social media as sustaining the entrepreneurial neoliberal self, not sure where/when/if it will be published.)
I took lots of notes while I was there; now I am having a lot of trouble deciphering them. Many of them, if I recall correctly, refer to the evolving strategies of work refusal discussed. The term is a bit of a misnomer. The idea of refusing work can seem odd in the midst of widespread unemployment and generalized precarity (indeed, one of the papers that stood out for me was Maria Isabel Casas-Cortes's tracing of the broadening circles of whom precarity could apply to), but it makes more sense if work is interpreted in the broadest sense to include the various forms of self-production, self-exploitation, and affective, digital and free labor that often go uncompensated by wages anyway. Franco "Bifo" Berardi's paper adopted this theme, advocating what sounded like voluntary simplicity, presumably as a means of thwarting the "hypercomplexity" and overload of our accelerated information processing capacities, though possibly also to escape the labor of consumption that reinforces consumerism, "semiocapitalism" (which I think means something like Baudrillard's conception of consumerism as consumption of signs), and individualism. I'm not sold on voluntary simplicity or some sort of hermeneutics of asceticism; more interesting to me was the implication that resistance could be organized and targeted at choice architecture and over-friendly user interfaces, which tend toward quietly normalizing one-dimensionality. Some of the same themes appear in his essay "Cognitarian Subectivation", which I commented on here.
Matteo Pasquinelli's paper suggested, in line with Christian Marazzi's work, that capitalism is moving to a model of rent extraction through financialization rather than exploiting surplus labor more directly. One might conceptualize this shift as a reaction to mechanization reducing the input of "living labor" into production, which would also be a way to characterize work refusal. I thought it fit with what Adam Arvidsson and Elanor Colleoni argue in their paper "Value in Information Capitalism and on the Internet" (pdf, my summary) with regard to Facebook.
Emanuel Rota discussed work refusal in terms of the right to be lazy, à la Paul Lafargue, whereas Stevphen Shukaitis stressed the necessity of "learning not to work," and the different forms work refusal must take according to different class positions and situations. He seemed to argue that we needed to better recognize affective labor so as to refuse it and cataloged the history of "art strikes," or the refusal of cultural labor. I presumed he meant the refusal not of creativity as such but the supplemental labor necessary for making creativity subsumable by capital -- the organizational and infrastructural labor that supports creative labor as a product, makes it packageable, profitable. This would include, as I conceive it, the branding, the marketing, the "getting it out there" work as well as the sort of care work that allows people to create in a self-aggrandizing mode. Shukaitis seemed to want to repartition work from leisure in order to facilitate the time-space for autonomous personal development, though this is easier said than done, considering that social recognition is now bound up with forms of self-commodification more than ever thanks to social media.
Refusing work is thus a matter of recharacterizing work as "ludic activity" -- which is a way of saying "play" without risking trivialization. But that can't collapse into entertaining oneself -- I am not sure that an art strike is needed; it seems like an attention strike is what's wanted, a refusal to get caught up in interactive entertainments that make our pursuit of distraction productive. Instead, we need what Federico Luisetti described during the session Q&A as a right to be bored -- a right to refuse to be entertained or distracted. It's easy to see this idea gaining momentum as information overload continues to worsen. Boredom will become a figure for the repose and replenishing necessary before concentration is possible, or perhaps even as a metonym for concentration itself. When capitalism wants to hurry us through commodified information at ever increasing speeds to valorize it all, boredom becomes a way of slowing things down, of resisting, of holding out for a minimal self rooted not in accumulation of trivia but in a kind of open-ended blankness.
I suppose I understand refusal of work as resisting personal branding, of refusing to be, as one speaker said, "dragged into networks of consumerism" in search of identity but holding out for other kinds of nurturing community that social networks increasingly obscure. It seems to me a matter of defying the injunction to be reflexive, to instrumentalize self-awareness, and try for self-forgetting. Instead of pursuing measurable attention, which induces one to see the self in terms of capitalistic accumulation and expansion, one could seek forms of intersubjectivity that supply a reciprocal recognition without lapsing into exploitable performativity. (I am failing by my own standards of course.)
Discussions ran the gamut from hairsplitting (to the untrained non-Spinozan) philosophical discussions of ontological accumulation and being-as-becoming to more hard-core Marxist themes like the composition of the working class, the organic composition of capital, and who comprises the revolutionary agent of history to practical assessments of the efficacy of, say, social media to activate the "multitude" (or, if you prefer, to sustain the Badiouian "communist hypothesis"), and it ended with a discussion of whether academia was at all a useful place for the discussion of any of this or whether it was fatally subsumed by capital. (I contributed a paper about social media as sustaining the entrepreneurial neoliberal self, not sure where/when/if it will be published.)
I took lots of notes while I was there; now I am having a lot of trouble deciphering them. Many of them, if I recall correctly, refer to the evolving strategies of work refusal discussed. The term is a bit of a misnomer. The idea of refusing work can seem odd in the midst of widespread unemployment and generalized precarity (indeed, one of the papers that stood out for me was Maria Isabel Casas-Cortes's tracing of the broadening circles of whom precarity could apply to), but it makes more sense if work is interpreted in the broadest sense to include the various forms of self-production, self-exploitation, and affective, digital and free labor that often go uncompensated by wages anyway. Franco "Bifo" Berardi's paper adopted this theme, advocating what sounded like voluntary simplicity, presumably as a means of thwarting the "hypercomplexity" and overload of our accelerated information processing capacities, though possibly also to escape the labor of consumption that reinforces consumerism, "semiocapitalism" (which I think means something like Baudrillard's conception of consumerism as consumption of signs), and individualism. I'm not sold on voluntary simplicity or some sort of hermeneutics of asceticism; more interesting to me was the implication that resistance could be organized and targeted at choice architecture and over-friendly user interfaces, which tend toward quietly normalizing one-dimensionality. Some of the same themes appear in his essay "Cognitarian Subectivation", which I commented on here.
Matteo Pasquinelli's paper suggested, in line with Christian Marazzi's work, that capitalism is moving to a model of rent extraction through financialization rather than exploiting surplus labor more directly. One might conceptualize this shift as a reaction to mechanization reducing the input of "living labor" into production, which would also be a way to characterize work refusal. I thought it fit with what Adam Arvidsson and Elanor Colleoni argue in their paper "Value in Information Capitalism and on the Internet" (pdf, my summary) with regard to Facebook.
Emanuel Rota discussed work refusal in terms of the right to be lazy, à la Paul Lafargue, whereas Stevphen Shukaitis stressed the necessity of "learning not to work," and the different forms work refusal must take according to different class positions and situations. He seemed to argue that we needed to better recognize affective labor so as to refuse it and cataloged the history of "art strikes," or the refusal of cultural labor. I presumed he meant the refusal not of creativity as such but the supplemental labor necessary for making creativity subsumable by capital -- the organizational and infrastructural labor that supports creative labor as a product, makes it packageable, profitable. This would include, as I conceive it, the branding, the marketing, the "getting it out there" work as well as the sort of care work that allows people to create in a self-aggrandizing mode. Shukaitis seemed to want to repartition work from leisure in order to facilitate the time-space for autonomous personal development, though this is easier said than done, considering that social recognition is now bound up with forms of self-commodification more than ever thanks to social media.
Refusing work is thus a matter of recharacterizing work as "ludic activity" -- which is a way of saying "play" without risking trivialization. But that can't collapse into entertaining oneself -- I am not sure that an art strike is needed; it seems like an attention strike is what's wanted, a refusal to get caught up in interactive entertainments that make our pursuit of distraction productive. Instead, we need what Federico Luisetti described during the session Q&A as a right to be bored -- a right to refuse to be entertained or distracted. It's easy to see this idea gaining momentum as information overload continues to worsen. Boredom will become a figure for the repose and replenishing necessary before concentration is possible, or perhaps even as a metonym for concentration itself. When capitalism wants to hurry us through commodified information at ever increasing speeds to valorize it all, boredom becomes a way of slowing things down, of resisting, of holding out for a minimal self rooted not in accumulation of trivia but in a kind of open-ended blankness.
I suppose I understand refusal of work as resisting personal branding, of refusing to be, as one speaker said, "dragged into networks of consumerism" in search of identity but holding out for other kinds of nurturing community that social networks increasingly obscure. It seems to me a matter of defying the injunction to be reflexive, to instrumentalize self-awareness, and try for self-forgetting. Instead of pursuing measurable attention, which induces one to see the self in terms of capitalistic accumulation and expansion, one could seek forms of intersubjectivity that supply a reciprocal recognition without lapsing into exploitable performativity. (I am failing by my own standards of course.)
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Middle class stagnation (20 April 2011)
Chrystia Freeland (who wrote the Atlantic story about the "new global elite" a few months ago) wrote about a recent paper (pdf) from the Council on Foreign Relations by economist Michael Spence and researcher Sandile Hlatshwayo. Her takeaway is that "Global capitalism isn’t working for the American middle class" and that this isn't the consequence of any market anomaly but of globalized markets working precisely as expected.
Steven Pearlstein, in a Washington Post piece about the same paper, regards it as a prescription for the return of industrial policy. But I was intrigued by the implications of something Freeland mentioned. She paraphrases something AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said at a CFR talk: "Stephenson enthused that the technology revolution was the most transformative shift in the world economy since the invention of the combustion engine and electrification, leading to a huge increase in 'the velocity of commerce' and therefore in productivity." I would need to have someone explain to me why productivity is linked to the "velocity of commerce" -- I see why faster commerce would lead to more things being exchanged, but not how it would lead to more being made with less. What Stephenson is saying implies that mere circulation of goods leads to their "valorization" -- leads value to be created -- or in other words, exchange itself is a form of production.
It makes sense that a communications company CEO would suggest that is true. Their consumers make the end product by exchanging language among themselves, and of course the more people talk, the more they need to say to clarify what they actually mean, and so on to infinity. (See, Derrida has important economic implications!) Will Davies has several good essays that get at the way telecoms try to prompt us to increase the amount of communication we engage in. "As the scarcity of Everything gradually wanes, the companies are becoming bolder in their branding of the infinite... Infinite opportunity to say, share, broadcast everything all the time anywhere has to be sold as a positive achievement, with a tangible result" -- though he argues it only leads mainly to restless anxiety, a twitchy subjectivity. (I also like how he updates Žižek's definition of neoliberalism -- "'you can do whatever you like, as long as it involves shopping" to "you can do whatever you like, as long as it involves an iPhone." Is it our destiny to turn shopping and self-fashioning and communicating about it constantly into the fulfillment of our species being?)
Anyway, Davies writes about the importance of an "ethic of inconvenience": slowing down the pace of commerce that is facilitated by communications technology, since this acceleration tends to push people toward a kind of one-dimensionality -- fixated on quantity and not quality, etc. This becomes a potentially more compelling idea in the macro context provided by the Spence paper, which suggests that increasing the "velocity of commerce" initiates a chain of consequences that ends with middle-class stagnation.
Spence says that as he was doing his research, he was often asked what “market failure” was responsible for these outcomes: Where were the skewed incentives, flawed regulations or missing information that led to this poor result? That question, Spence says, misses the point. “Multinational companies,” he said, “are doing exactly what one would expect them to do. The resulting efficiency of the global system is high and rising. So there is no market failure.”If that's so, that means the justificatory economic arguments for pro-globalization policy must be pitched at hiding the consequences of who benefits and who doesn't. Globalization has helped capital and impoverished workers in developing economies, but has hurt every one else in the U.S. Maybe U.S. voters are egalitarian and internationalist in their outlook and would happily stagnate so that China could build a middle class of its own. But it may be that if voters knew that, as Spence puts it (and these quotes come from Freeland's article), "many of the middle-income group ... are seeing employment options narrow and incomes stagnate" thanks to neoliberalism, perhaps they would demand a different sort of policy. Spence writes, "One possible response to these trends would be to assert that market outcomes, especially efficient ones, always make everyone better off in the long run. That seems clearly incorrect and is supported by neither theory nor experience.” In other words, there are winners and losers, and one doesn't need to spend too much time studying the income distribution in the U.S. to figure out who is winning here.
Steven Pearlstein, in a Washington Post piece about the same paper, regards it as a prescription for the return of industrial policy. But I was intrigued by the implications of something Freeland mentioned. She paraphrases something AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said at a CFR talk: "Stephenson enthused that the technology revolution was the most transformative shift in the world economy since the invention of the combustion engine and electrification, leading to a huge increase in 'the velocity of commerce' and therefore in productivity." I would need to have someone explain to me why productivity is linked to the "velocity of commerce" -- I see why faster commerce would lead to more things being exchanged, but not how it would lead to more being made with less. What Stephenson is saying implies that mere circulation of goods leads to their "valorization" -- leads value to be created -- or in other words, exchange itself is a form of production.
It makes sense that a communications company CEO would suggest that is true. Their consumers make the end product by exchanging language among themselves, and of course the more people talk, the more they need to say to clarify what they actually mean, and so on to infinity. (See, Derrida has important economic implications!) Will Davies has several good essays that get at the way telecoms try to prompt us to increase the amount of communication we engage in. "As the scarcity of Everything gradually wanes, the companies are becoming bolder in their branding of the infinite... Infinite opportunity to say, share, broadcast everything all the time anywhere has to be sold as a positive achievement, with a tangible result" -- though he argues it only leads mainly to restless anxiety, a twitchy subjectivity. (I also like how he updates Žižek's definition of neoliberalism -- "'you can do whatever you like, as long as it involves shopping" to "you can do whatever you like, as long as it involves an iPhone." Is it our destiny to turn shopping and self-fashioning and communicating about it constantly into the fulfillment of our species being?)
Anyway, Davies writes about the importance of an "ethic of inconvenience": slowing down the pace of commerce that is facilitated by communications technology, since this acceleration tends to push people toward a kind of one-dimensionality -- fixated on quantity and not quality, etc. This becomes a potentially more compelling idea in the macro context provided by the Spence paper, which suggests that increasing the "velocity of commerce" initiates a chain of consequences that ends with middle-class stagnation.
More on the Future of Work (23 March 2011)
Following up on the themes of my previous post (and untold dozens of others -- maybe I should start using a tagging system?): the P2P Foundation blog linked to a write-up (pdf) of a round table symposium put on by the Aspen Institute on the future of work. Among the participants were analysts from McKinsey and Deloitte and executives from Microsoft, IBM and Infosys, along with a bunch of other Silicon Valley think-tank types. It delineates how business elites would like to put across increasing precarity for workers as "freedom" and details some of the ideological resistance they expect to encounter.
The participants identify the emergence of the "post-Sloanist" worker (that is, the worker who exceeds the constraints of 20th century "scientific management" and organization engineering):
And eventually, ADD will cease to be regarded as a disorder and will instead be an institutionalized educational outcome. The report continues, "a great deal of work is likely to become less routine and more exception-based, especially in knowledge-based jobs." It will be reactive; workers will perform triage as information pours in rather than initiate work processes.
Lots of the round table's conclusions are similar to ideas I've been harping about in previous posts about how changes in how we regard work augment the mounting stressfulness of neoliberal subjectivity. To list some of the changes: that work organization is becoming less directed and hierarchical and more a matter of "crowdsourcing" and post hoc capture; that the fixed workplace is being dispersed into a "social factory"; that firms are being supplanted by "platforms" (think Facebook); that work and leisure are becoming indistinguishable; that identity construction is merging with work, that consumption skills are increasingly regarded as productive and innovative in their own right and are being incorporated into manufacturing processes; that what constitutes work skills is also becoming more nebulous and hazily linked to education. Now, some of the participants suggested, the importance of discrete skills is being supplanted by the significance of "disposition" -- a rough analogue for what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called habitus.
So we are enjoined to always be cultivating an identity that will justify our worth to employers, and this perpetual process of becoming our better selves is expected to constantly throw off value. The disposition becomes our job; producing ourselves becomes mandatory, and linked to our economic survival. As a result, being "yourself" has never been more stressful. "Workers will regard their work lives as an experience, a lifestyle and an identity—not just a paycheck," the report suggests, and that is supposed to be a good thing: For some in the creative-class vanguard, work seems to be increasingly unalienated (these people are entrepreneurs of their personal brand and reaping a livelihood from it) and indistinguishable from the process of just living life. And this may be the model of the workplace of the future generally. But this sort of "freedom" comes at the expense of other forms, mainly the freedom from having to capitalize on every aspect of one's selfhood.
To paraphrase from Baudrillard's The Consumer Society, which repeatedly makes the point that our needs are not autonomous and not our own invention, the need to engage in conspicuous self-fashioning has become systemic; it's no longer the product of what individuals actually want, if it ever was so. Identity has been made productive in and of itself, and thus has been subsumed, integrated into the capitalist system. Again, to recast Baudrillard, the strenuously defended right to a unique self actually betokens the loss of such lived uniqueness, its transition to an exchangeable commodity, a form of abstracted labor.
The shift away from specific job skills to dispositions raises many other issues as well: If a disposition for creativity and symbolic-meaning making is the new valuable skill set, can it be differentiated from social and cultural capital that stems from class? Can a person be taught how to make distinction (in Bourdieu's sense of the word) if one lacks the proper class distinctions to begin with, or would the fact that you needed to learn them automatically disqualify you? How do you teach flexibility and a willingness to bend rules as well as follow them, depending on the situation? How do you teach an instinct for design and cultural trends? Can there be a school that teaches hipsterism? And how much hipsterism can the economy support? (Will Davies says not as much as many aspiring bohemians would like; he advises they drop aesthetic consumption for political organizing -- good luck with that!)
The participants identify the emergence of the "post-Sloanist" worker (that is, the worker who exceeds the constraints of 20th century "scientific management" and organization engineering):
Every worker will have to become a continuous learner, he said, and will likely hold multiple jobs over the course of his or her lifetime, if not multiple careers. Many workers will need to work at part-time jobs and perhaps hold down multiple jobs simultaneously, he added. The ability to multitask and deal with interruptions to work will become mandatory skills.
And eventually, ADD will cease to be regarded as a disorder and will instead be an institutionalized educational outcome. The report continues, "a great deal of work is likely to become less routine and more exception-based, especially in knowledge-based jobs." It will be reactive; workers will perform triage as information pours in rather than initiate work processes.
Lots of the round table's conclusions are similar to ideas I've been harping about in previous posts about how changes in how we regard work augment the mounting stressfulness of neoliberal subjectivity. To list some of the changes: that work organization is becoming less directed and hierarchical and more a matter of "crowdsourcing" and post hoc capture; that the fixed workplace is being dispersed into a "social factory"; that firms are being supplanted by "platforms" (think Facebook); that work and leisure are becoming indistinguishable; that identity construction is merging with work, that consumption skills are increasingly regarded as productive and innovative in their own right and are being incorporated into manufacturing processes; that what constitutes work skills is also becoming more nebulous and hazily linked to education. Now, some of the participants suggested, the importance of discrete skills is being supplanted by the significance of "disposition" -- a rough analogue for what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called habitus.
Employers must recognize that they are not just hiring a set of skills, they are hiring people based on their personal temperaments. “In a world of continual and rapid change, maybe the most important things are dispositions that allow you to embrace change,” said John Seely Brown, Independent Co-Chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge.... “You can’t teach dispositions,” said Brown. “You cultivate them.” Employers cannot simply communicate information to workers; they must provide a hospitable, immersive environment for workers to satisfy their dispositions and talents.
So we are enjoined to always be cultivating an identity that will justify our worth to employers, and this perpetual process of becoming our better selves is expected to constantly throw off value. The disposition becomes our job; producing ourselves becomes mandatory, and linked to our economic survival. As a result, being "yourself" has never been more stressful. "Workers will regard their work lives as an experience, a lifestyle and an identity—not just a paycheck," the report suggests, and that is supposed to be a good thing: For some in the creative-class vanguard, work seems to be increasingly unalienated (these people are entrepreneurs of their personal brand and reaping a livelihood from it) and indistinguishable from the process of just living life. And this may be the model of the workplace of the future generally. But this sort of "freedom" comes at the expense of other forms, mainly the freedom from having to capitalize on every aspect of one's selfhood.
To paraphrase from Baudrillard's The Consumer Society, which repeatedly makes the point that our needs are not autonomous and not our own invention, the need to engage in conspicuous self-fashioning has become systemic; it's no longer the product of what individuals actually want, if it ever was so. Identity has been made productive in and of itself, and thus has been subsumed, integrated into the capitalist system. Again, to recast Baudrillard, the strenuously defended right to a unique self actually betokens the loss of such lived uniqueness, its transition to an exchangeable commodity, a form of abstracted labor.
The shift away from specific job skills to dispositions raises many other issues as well: If a disposition for creativity and symbolic-meaning making is the new valuable skill set, can it be differentiated from social and cultural capital that stems from class? Can a person be taught how to make distinction (in Bourdieu's sense of the word) if one lacks the proper class distinctions to begin with, or would the fact that you needed to learn them automatically disqualify you? How do you teach flexibility and a willingness to bend rules as well as follow them, depending on the situation? How do you teach an instinct for design and cultural trends? Can there be a school that teaches hipsterism? And how much hipsterism can the economy support? (Will Davies says not as much as many aspiring bohemians would like; he advises they drop aesthetic consumption for political organizing -- good luck with that!)
Useless Labor and Production of the Self (18 Feb 2011)
Why won't hipsterism ever go away? Consider that technology (facilitated by capitalism's emphasis on efficiency; i.e., consider the assembly line a technology as well as the internet) is stripping people of what has been traditionally defined as "useful" or "legitimate" or "meaningful" work, and thus stripping meaning from their lives. "Nothing productive left to do since the robots came; better make my consumption more flamboyant and self-announcing!"
Ryan Avent, paraphrasing a point made by Steve Waldman in a great post on Tyler Cowen's recent book The Great Stagnation, writes:
One might object that no labor is in fact "useless" if someone is willing to pay for it. If that is so, then we will naturally begin to increasingly locate our self-worth in net worth, since social recognition is not conferred by the quality of our social contribution in these useless fields (though the examples given, heath care and education, are not particularly useless, just somewhat immaterial). But if the "useless" work -- and I am thinking more of designy-ness, creative-class hucksterism, culture industry, etc., than care work -- must be subsidized via the government through a redistribution regime, theoretically something that might look like a negative income tax (Guy Sorman recently defended the idea in City Journal here), then what we make (money or stuff) can't testify to our personal value either. We're doing useless things and collecting the dole like the rest of our peers, so what makes us stand out?
Hence the field of consumption becomes the field of distinction and social recognition as well, and consuming becomes a sort of semiotic labor that absorbs more and more of our natural inclination to do something regarded as socially useful. (And Shop Class as Soulcraft-style retro crafts like carpentry and gardening and Etsy-ism start to register as consumerist hobbies, not "real" production.) Social media supplies the factory and distribution center for this sort of work, as well as the scoreboard in the form of data about just how many people are paying attention to you. We produce content and links to try to "connect" to others, that is, have them regard us as socially necessary the way, say, in the 19th century the village blacksmith was vitally necessary when the horse you were traveling on pulled up lame. (Okay, that was a somewhat far-flung, Downton Abbey-inspired example.) The point is we want to feel useful, and there are fewer opportunities for that in the sphere of production. So consumption becomes production, and the main way that happens is to make what we consume more salient and more socially significant, to have it inflect an ever-shifting language of status signifiers.
This whole set-up, in turn, fuels the view that narcissism and hipsterism are increasing society-wide, since self-production in the mode of marketing copy (developing the personal brand) is more and more what people do, if not for a living, then simply to appear, to be socially relevant.
Ryan Avent, paraphrasing a point made by Steve Waldman in a great post on Tyler Cowen's recent book The Great Stagnation, writes:
The big innovations are all massively labour-saving. Humanity has gotten richer because new technologies have enabled people to wring ever more out of a given level of labour. And so through this long era of rapid technological change, people are constantly being thrown out of work and asked to find something useful to do. Throughout the 20th century, government has been there to provide that something. Governments at all levels have grown, in both absolute terms and as a share of the economy. So, too, has employment in government-like fields like health care and education. Maybe, just maybe, the growth of these fields isn't a drag on output. Maybe those fields have grown to absorb the increasing mass of more or less useless labour in "gainful" employment, and to provide those workers with an income—a share of the surplus generated by the productive sector that they can use to live off and perpetuate the consumption portion of the economy.
One might object that no labor is in fact "useless" if someone is willing to pay for it. If that is so, then we will naturally begin to increasingly locate our self-worth in net worth, since social recognition is not conferred by the quality of our social contribution in these useless fields (though the examples given, heath care and education, are not particularly useless, just somewhat immaterial). But if the "useless" work -- and I am thinking more of designy-ness, creative-class hucksterism, culture industry, etc., than care work -- must be subsidized via the government through a redistribution regime, theoretically something that might look like a negative income tax (Guy Sorman recently defended the idea in City Journal here), then what we make (money or stuff) can't testify to our personal value either. We're doing useless things and collecting the dole like the rest of our peers, so what makes us stand out?
Hence the field of consumption becomes the field of distinction and social recognition as well, and consuming becomes a sort of semiotic labor that absorbs more and more of our natural inclination to do something regarded as socially useful. (And Shop Class as Soulcraft-style retro crafts like carpentry and gardening and Etsy-ism start to register as consumerist hobbies, not "real" production.) Social media supplies the factory and distribution center for this sort of work, as well as the scoreboard in the form of data about just how many people are paying attention to you. We produce content and links to try to "connect" to others, that is, have them regard us as socially necessary the way, say, in the 19th century the village blacksmith was vitally necessary when the horse you were traveling on pulled up lame. (Okay, that was a somewhat far-flung, Downton Abbey-inspired example.) The point is we want to feel useful, and there are fewer opportunities for that in the sphere of production. So consumption becomes production, and the main way that happens is to make what we consume more salient and more socially significant, to have it inflect an ever-shifting language of status signifiers.
This whole set-up, in turn, fuels the view that narcissism and hipsterism are increasing society-wide, since self-production in the mode of marketing copy (developing the personal brand) is more and more what people do, if not for a living, then simply to appear, to be socially relevant.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Breaking the Iron Rice Bowl (19 Jan 2011)
I've read several interesting articles about China and not one of them has to do with tiger moms. Many people have noted this Francis Fukuyama op-ed in the FT about China: "Americans have long hoped China might undergo a democratic transition as it got wealthier, and before it became powerful enough to become a strategic and political threat. This seems unlikely, however. The government knows how to cater to the interests of Chinese elites and the emerging middle classes, and builds on their fear of populism. This is why there is little support for genuine multi-party democracy." He argues that China's authoritarianism will thrive as long as it can continue to provide economic growth from the commanding heights, regardless of the inequality its governance seems to be generating. Protests remain local and marginalized, and those who aren't reduced to apathy by their immiseration likely focus on improving their personal lot rather than figuring out how to forge solidarity. A useful by product of the state's having "broken the iron rice bowl" and done away with most of the social safety net.
Ads Without Products offers some thoughts on Chinese workers, inspired by Ai Weiwei's installation featuring 100 million handmade porcelain seeds.
Nouriel Roubini has an item in Newsweek about the "Confucian conusmer" that explores those "tipped scales" in macro terms. Roubini covers the longstanding problem of global imbalances: the "Chinese model of economic growth required the U.S. and a few other countries to be consumers of first and last resort, spending more than their income and running ever-larger trade deficits—so that China could be the producer of first and last resort, spending less than its income and building ever-larger trade surpluses." He then speculates as to why the Chinese don't consume more. I always find this question fascinating, because I wonder whether China is hatching an alternative to the consumerism with which we've been inculcated in the West, and if so, whether it is more or less corrosive to personal identity. Roubini lists seven "structural reasons" why the Chinese savings rate is so high, including some of the usual suspects -- the broken iron rice bowl, the demographic troubles brought on by the one-child policy (one grandchild must support four elderly grandparents). This recent VoxEU paper makes the case that much of the savings rate can be explained by "increased income uncertainty" and unfavorable pension reforms.
Neither Roubini nor the VoxEU paper mention the alleged "Confucian character" of the Chinese people that is sometimes presumed to make them less interested in material prosperity and invidious distinction. Presumably the "iron rice bowl" would have facilitated that attitude as well any traditional tenets about social stability. Roubini stresses corporate oversaving, which stems from underdeveloped financial markets: "a whopping 25 percent of savings in China is in the form of the retained earnings of the corporate sector, mostly state-owned enterprises (SOEs). In most private economies, those firms’ profits would become dividends that would increase household income and thus consumption. In China, they become retained profits that go into more capital accumulation and excess capacity." In other words, the profits from all those manufacturing firms making our iPods and the like don't go into wages and they don't go into dividends -- they go into building even more factories, which has the effect of making the global imbalances worse.
That eventually trickles down to the level of ordinary American consumers, who face an even cheaper and more tempting flood of consumer goods, making it that much more difficult to transition out of a wasteful lifestyle and into one that's more austere, self-sufficient, and environmentally responsible. Or into one that revolves less around the consumerist values of novelty and convenience and disposability and isolation and so forth. Thus Chinese economic policy exerts material pressure on the ideology governing our behavior in the West. Even if they were Confucian consumers there, they could not export that approach to consumerism to us -- they actually export our own attitude about consumerism to us, anchoring it, supplying its base. And breaking the iron rice bowl hasn't acclimated Chinese to increased personal choice and consumption in a market society as might be expected; instead it has fomented insecurity and rational miserliness. I wonder if this is what conservatives hope to bring to the U.S. when they fantasize about undoing health care reform -- more insecurity and less consumer spending seems like a great recipe to stop the "job killing."
Ads Without Products offers some thoughts on Chinese workers, inspired by Ai Weiwei's installation featuring 100 million handmade porcelain seeds.
When the visual titanicness of the display meets your recognition that each of the 100,000,000 seeds was painstakingly handpainted by human beings working for a wage, one comes as close as one can – as I ever have – to a painfully concrete yet at the same time marvellously abstract sense of the absurd scales, absurdly tipped scales, that orchestrate our world today.It is very hard to fathom the scope of the labor whose availability in the global economy we have come to take for granted. What does it mean? For the workers, it means stultifying alienation: AWP cites a BusinessWeek article about Foxconn, the megamanufacturing firm that makes Apple's goods, among many other things.
“Life is meaningless,” said Ah Wei, his fingernails stained black with the dust from the hundreds of mobile phones he has burnished over the course of a 12-hour overnight shift. “Everyday, I repeat the same thing I did yesterday. We get yelled at all the time. It’s very tough around here.”For us, it means a life more thoroughly saturated with consumerism
Nouriel Roubini has an item in Newsweek about the "Confucian conusmer" that explores those "tipped scales" in macro terms. Roubini covers the longstanding problem of global imbalances: the "Chinese model of economic growth required the U.S. and a few other countries to be consumers of first and last resort, spending more than their income and running ever-larger trade deficits—so that China could be the producer of first and last resort, spending less than its income and building ever-larger trade surpluses." He then speculates as to why the Chinese don't consume more. I always find this question fascinating, because I wonder whether China is hatching an alternative to the consumerism with which we've been inculcated in the West, and if so, whether it is more or less corrosive to personal identity. Roubini lists seven "structural reasons" why the Chinese savings rate is so high, including some of the usual suspects -- the broken iron rice bowl, the demographic troubles brought on by the one-child policy (one grandchild must support four elderly grandparents). This recent VoxEU paper makes the case that much of the savings rate can be explained by "increased income uncertainty" and unfavorable pension reforms.
Neither Roubini nor the VoxEU paper mention the alleged "Confucian character" of the Chinese people that is sometimes presumed to make them less interested in material prosperity and invidious distinction. Presumably the "iron rice bowl" would have facilitated that attitude as well any traditional tenets about social stability. Roubini stresses corporate oversaving, which stems from underdeveloped financial markets: "a whopping 25 percent of savings in China is in the form of the retained earnings of the corporate sector, mostly state-owned enterprises (SOEs). In most private economies, those firms’ profits would become dividends that would increase household income and thus consumption. In China, they become retained profits that go into more capital accumulation and excess capacity." In other words, the profits from all those manufacturing firms making our iPods and the like don't go into wages and they don't go into dividends -- they go into building even more factories, which has the effect of making the global imbalances worse.
That eventually trickles down to the level of ordinary American consumers, who face an even cheaper and more tempting flood of consumer goods, making it that much more difficult to transition out of a wasteful lifestyle and into one that's more austere, self-sufficient, and environmentally responsible. Or into one that revolves less around the consumerist values of novelty and convenience and disposability and isolation and so forth. Thus Chinese economic policy exerts material pressure on the ideology governing our behavior in the West. Even if they were Confucian consumers there, they could not export that approach to consumerism to us -- they actually export our own attitude about consumerism to us, anchoring it, supplying its base. And breaking the iron rice bowl hasn't acclimated Chinese to increased personal choice and consumption in a market society as might be expected; instead it has fomented insecurity and rational miserliness. I wonder if this is what conservatives hope to bring to the U.S. when they fantasize about undoing health care reform -- more insecurity and less consumer spending seems like a great recipe to stop the "job killing."
Wages and Prizes (8 Dec 2010)
I put a link to this post by Jodi Dean on my Twitter feed (@marginalutility -- I have periodically been posting links there, as well as the customary self-promotion) but wanted to highlight it here too. Dean excerpts a portion of her conference paper (draft pdf) on the future of democracy that makes an interesting point about the internet and social media and so on starting to transform labor markets into contests. The shift to a more network-driven economy -- one which exploits the communications common (itself increasingly online and controlled/administered by big internet companies like Google and Facebook) -- means that markets, more driven by power-law distribution, tend to become more winner-take-all for competing conglomerates, which hope to market the mega-selling products that will dominate their sectors. Dean argues that the communication common online is being fostered as a petri dish in which those megasellers ("the one") can be identified or developed: "Exploitation consists in efforts to stimulate the creative production of the field in the interest of finding, and then monetizing, the one. Expanding the field produces the one (or, hubs are an immanent property of complex networks)."
In other words, the pool of quasi-voluntary communication that has been captured online by private companies makes up a big productive resource out of which certain economic winners emerge. The emergence depends on the mass of participants, virtually all of whom get only the satisfaction of participation as their reward, even though the work they are doing for free is removing jobs from the economy, and hurting them all, as a proletarianized class, in the aggregate. Those conditions -- which resemble a general lottery -- naturalize the idea that wages for work should be determined through a contest settled "democratically" by participating individuals, possibly in social media, rather than something negotiated into contracts, possibly by unions. Social media and the communities they tend to generate end up being fake unions that neutralize real ones.
And as consumption and production merge in everyday life for more people, it seems normal to work hard merely for a chance at getting the money one needs to live.
In other words, the pool of quasi-voluntary communication that has been captured online by private companies makes up a big productive resource out of which certain economic winners emerge. The emergence depends on the mass of participants, virtually all of whom get only the satisfaction of participation as their reward, even though the work they are doing for free is removing jobs from the economy, and hurting them all, as a proletarianized class, in the aggregate. Those conditions -- which resemble a general lottery -- naturalize the idea that wages for work should be determined through a contest settled "democratically" by participating individuals, possibly in social media, rather than something negotiated into contracts, possibly by unions. Social media and the communities they tend to generate end up being fake unions that neutralize real ones.
And as consumption and production merge in everyday life for more people, it seems normal to work hard merely for a chance at getting the money one needs to live.
Rather than having a right to the proceeds of one’s labor by virtue of a contract, ever more of us win or lose such that remuneration is treated like a prize. In academia, art, writing, architecture, entertainment, design, and, in the US, increasing numbers of different areas (education, technology), people not only feel fortunate to get work, to get hired, to get paid, but ever more tasks and projects are conducted as competitions, which means that those doing the work are not paid unless they win. They work but only for a chance at pay.What makes this potentially worse is that such work (being online and contributing or organizing information, sharing), so much closer subjectively to consumption or self-actualization, will register as meaningful and will feel like progress. Perhaps this sort of work (sometimes called immaterial labor), combined with welfare payments, could be the foundation of a less exploitative social order in which what people do "for a living" actually seems to constitute the meaning of their life, and no one is left "unemployed" and rendered socially worthless. But under our current conditions, immaterial labor mainly makes life more precarious, and taints the things we ordinarily would enjoy doing with an urgent anxiety. We can't just be ourselves; we have to make ourselves a personal brand that we desperately need our friends, i.e. networked nodes, to buy into.
The unemployed and the unemployable (3 Dec 2010)
Continuing the theme from yesterday's post, the habitual, ideological association of employment with social and self-worth makes reports like the most recent from the BLS completely unacceptable. This NYT piece by Catherine Rampell details some of the reasons. European data has shown that "people who become disconnected from the work force have more trouble getting hired, probably because of some combination of stigma, discouragement and deterioration of their skills." This leads to their complete segregation from the mainstream of life. Rampell's piece ends on this cheerful note:
As Chris Dillow points out here, job insecurity is something of a constant, and recessions just amplify the volatility slightly. But this doesn't mean we should accept the fact that "even in the best of times, many of those in work are living lives of fear and insecurity" as the natural order of things. Dillow argues that "macroeconomic policy alone is a weak tool for reducing the individual, idiosyncratic risks that workers face," which means tinkering at the fiscal edges is an extremely roundabout way of trying to massage unemployment figures. Different kinds of action in a different realm of policy are perhaps required.
If the current level of unemployment in the U.S. is "structural" and is truly going to be persistent and cannot be ameliorated by state action, then other efforts must be made to shift ideological notions about the unemployed to ease the psychological damage -- to shift to a post-work welfare state that is justified by technological improvements that have made more jobs superfluous. (This is not so far-fetched; Gluskin Sheff's David Rosenberg points out that already "a record near 20% of personal income is now being derived from government transfer payments" in the U.S.) But it just doesn't seem to be the case that there is an actual shortage of tasks that we would want done as a society; it seems more that the economy has fallen under the direction of those who see more profitability in maintaining a reserve army of the unemployed than in finding new goods and services to produce. And everybody ultimately suffers then as the country inevitably stagnates. Think I'll take a cue from the herbavores and go pout in a mirror somewhere.
“After a while, a lot of European countries just got used to having 8 or 9 percent unemployment, where they just said, ‘Hey, that’s about good enough,’ ” said Gary Burtless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “If the unemployment rates here stay high but remain relatively stable, people may not worry so much that that’ll be their fate this month or next year. And all these unemployed people will fall from the front of their mind, and that’s it for them.”That's "it" for them? What does that even mean? They just become a permanent disenfranchised derelict class, ghosts among us reminding us of our doom if we fall afoul of the nation's HR departments? (Because we certainly want the warm, compassionate people in "human resources" controlling our social destiny.) And who are these people? Via Twitter, Mike Konczal (@rortybomb) notes that in the latest report, unemployment for people with a bachelor's degree jumped 0.4% over last month to 5.1%. Maybe these people will come to resemble the Japanese "herbivores" Rebecca Allen describes in this Semionaut post. The opposite of the self-reliant entrepreneurial ideal, these are passive Japanese men noted for their extreme narcissism, their fussy grooming habits, and their paralyzing risk aversion. Perhaps there will be hipster Hoovervilles in America once unemployability becomes an even more common outcome for those just graduating. Maybe this is already happening.
As Chris Dillow points out here, job insecurity is something of a constant, and recessions just amplify the volatility slightly. But this doesn't mean we should accept the fact that "even in the best of times, many of those in work are living lives of fear and insecurity" as the natural order of things. Dillow argues that "macroeconomic policy alone is a weak tool for reducing the individual, idiosyncratic risks that workers face," which means tinkering at the fiscal edges is an extremely roundabout way of trying to massage unemployment figures. Different kinds of action in a different realm of policy are perhaps required.
If the current level of unemployment in the U.S. is "structural" and is truly going to be persistent and cannot be ameliorated by state action, then other efforts must be made to shift ideological notions about the unemployed to ease the psychological damage -- to shift to a post-work welfare state that is justified by technological improvements that have made more jobs superfluous. (This is not so far-fetched; Gluskin Sheff's David Rosenberg points out that already "a record near 20% of personal income is now being derived from government transfer payments" in the U.S.) But it just doesn't seem to be the case that there is an actual shortage of tasks that we would want done as a society; it seems more that the economy has fallen under the direction of those who see more profitability in maintaining a reserve army of the unemployed than in finding new goods and services to produce. And everybody ultimately suffers then as the country inevitably stagnates. Think I'll take a cue from the herbavores and go pout in a mirror somewhere.
Dignity and Work (2 Dec 2010)
These are some tentative thoughts about convolutions in the ideology of work. Should the point of our lives be found in escaping work or finding meaningful work? Is our answer to that question inescapably predetermined by the existing economy? How does society assign work to individuals in a way that allows the individuals to seize upon it as meaningful, fulfilling, and does consumer capitalism inevitably militate against that?
At Interfluidity, Steve Waldman recently wrote about his frustration over technocratic Keynesian economists' efforts to advance policy without framing their case in moral terms, as the advocates of austerity so eagerly do. Despite the patronizing insistence of Krugman, DeLong, etc., "human affairs are a morality play," Waldman writes, "and economics, if it is to be useful at all, must be an account of human affairs." To make the case against austerity and the "hangover theory" of recessions (that after the party there must be a sober time of deprivation) and the sense that government stimulus efforts help the "undeserving poor" (those who, conservatives like to argue, were too stupid or lazy to acquire skills the economy needs, and those who defaulted on their debts), one should stress the ethical irresponsibility of creditors and lenders during bubbles and argue for their carrying their appropriate share of the post-bubble burden -- i.e. they should suffer losses rather than be bailed out. Waldman argues that "ethical lending for yield always involves risk-sharing: lenders must understand if the enterprise to which they lend fails badly, costs will be borne by both borrower and lender."
Waldman clarified his argument in a follow-up post:
I suppose some people continue to regard ideology as mainly political and something that is explicit. This merely hides the way ideology actually works to situate our perceptions, color our thoughts with what seem like moral intuitions, to make contradictions cohere as the expectations of us change as we shift between contexts and roles. To change policy, as Waldman suggests in his most recent post, a "better approach would be to understand the way in which the theory might in fact be true and useful, and to craft a morality tale that both captures what is accurate in the story and leads to more productive and just intuitions about how we should behave."
That post focuses on ideological notions about work and prosperity and how production is valued. Lots of ideological questions in economics can be resolved into ideas about value -- how it is defined, created, measured, justly distributed. It seems like common sense (something somebody wants has value, right?), but Marx, for one, wrote several tomes trying to get to the bottom of it (Theories of Surplus Value, Grundrisse, Capital) that seemed only to make the issue more obscure. (See this article by Anders Ramsay for more on Wertgegenständlichkeit vs. Verausgabung.) Usually it just gets postulated as equivalent to GDP, to growth, which raises the issue of whether GDP captures public well-being. Growth is only as good for society as the distribution of it is held to be just. That's the substance of another endless ideological battle over what are fair returns to various kinds of property and labor.
The debate about what the financial industry produces is about whether they create value/growth, or merely shift money around to their own benefit. And who needs to be coddled to help the economy create more value -- capital or labor? Further questions arise when you look at how value changes as goods circulate. Does consumption create value in any socially meaningful way, or does it destroy it, as the word consumption implies? What is the relation of value to price? Is work valuable in and of itself to workers?
These ideological questions obviously shape the macroeconomic story that gets told. Conservatives tend to tell a story about the economy that stresses "structural unemployment" (unemployment is the result of skills mismatch, not a cyclical lack of aggregate demand for goods and services) and overconsumption during bubbles (the wrong sorts of people spent too much on things they didn't deserve to have). They extend no pity to those overconsumers who suffer (losing their jobs, homes, etc.) in recessions they regard as necessary to clear the debt overhang and forestall inflation.
Economist Karl Smith points out that it makes no sense to punish overconsumption with unemployment but goes too far, in Waldman's view, when he suggests, as many liberals tend to, that prosperity is a matter of full employment, the most people making the most stuff.
Waldman, attempting a sort of synthesis of Austrian and Keynesian views, responds by basically questioning the nature of the "value" of work: is it in the products they make, or is it a matter of keeping people busy and allowing them to feel as though what they do is socially meaningful? "We should never, ever measure prosperity in terms of consumption, but always in terms of production, weighted, importantly, by the strength of financial arrangements that allow us to convert unconsumed production into credible options to consume later." That is, production that can be turned into and out of savings without losing too much value. (This relates to the issues of overproduction or miscalculation, of an economy making stuff people don't want down the road.) Waldman continues, "However, we do not measure prosperity in terms of how much work people are doing. That is a terrible error and the most vulgar form of Keynesianism. Make-work is not a path to prosperity, and effort is not production." Effort has to make something that can be exchanged to qualify as production -- it has to be "socially necessary" in some sense. Someone must want to consume it. (The question usually debated is whether the government can be that someone.)
Then Waldman gets to what I see as the crux of the matter:
That seems to vindicate the worst aspect of consumerism, that what we buy is more important to the grand scheme of things than what we do, which is important only insofar as it it gives us purchasing power. But this is the implicit ideology of the wage system, which makes all forms of work commensurable; this is the "foolish arrangement" that makes employment the "main source of claims on production." Consumerism -- a society devoted to circulating goods for the sheer sake of their circulation, which produces "value" (where Marxist "valorization" occurs) -- inevitably follows from a system that abstracts labor from its context, from the satisfactions it supplies to the worker and from the needs it ultimately satisfies. Consumerist values -- novelty, convenience, daydreaming, vicariousness, passivity, obsessive collecting -- all follow from this.
When Waldman suggests that "the ability to confer value through purchase could be distributed via means other than employment," he seems to be hinting at the possibility of a social wage, of something akin to universal welfare payments -- an idea almost unthinkable in the current ideological environment. But it may be the only way we escape a system that reduces all forms of value to expressions of individual consumer preference and that allows us to conceive of prosperity without people doing anything.
At Interfluidity, Steve Waldman recently wrote about his frustration over technocratic Keynesian economists' efforts to advance policy without framing their case in moral terms, as the advocates of austerity so eagerly do. Despite the patronizing insistence of Krugman, DeLong, etc., "human affairs are a morality play," Waldman writes, "and economics, if it is to be useful at all, must be an account of human affairs." To make the case against austerity and the "hangover theory" of recessions (that after the party there must be a sober time of deprivation) and the sense that government stimulus efforts help the "undeserving poor" (those who, conservatives like to argue, were too stupid or lazy to acquire skills the economy needs, and those who defaulted on their debts), one should stress the ethical irresponsibility of creditors and lenders during bubbles and argue for their carrying their appropriate share of the post-bubble burden -- i.e. they should suffer losses rather than be bailed out. Waldman argues that "ethical lending for yield always involves risk-sharing: lenders must understand if the enterprise to which they lend fails badly, costs will be borne by both borrower and lender."
Waldman clarified his argument in a follow-up post:
My evaluation is based on a view of how human beings regulate social conduct. I think we do so primarily via moral heuristics. Those heuristics both shape and are shaped by reason. But our moral intuitions are more durable than reasoned conjectures, and more pervasive in guiding how we actually behave. Importantly, I think that moral heuristics are socially determined and malleable. I think we all become very different people when we immerse ourselves in different communities, and that individually and collectively our moral heuristics do change over time."Moral heuristic" seems to be econospeak for ideology: The point he is making here mirrors that which social theorists try to articulate when talking about how ideology functions: as a decisionmaking mode that preempts rational calculation (arguably an ideology itself, but that's a different question) and relies on what we reflexively identify as common sense without questioning why. Because of the social-class climate we are raised in and the institutions that structure our everyday life and the prevailing "relations of production" and so on, certain moral ideas will feel instinctively right, and biases in our reasoning, in what we choose to argue or assume as postulates, often derive from these unexamined principles. These intuitions can change, but that process is usually obscure, semiconscious -- it requires changes in one's milieu, in those institutions in which we are embedded, as well as some recognized personal volition to think and believe differently, to resist what had been common sense. It is a social and individual process simultaneously, and those changes are in dialectical tension, etc., etc.
I suppose some people continue to regard ideology as mainly political and something that is explicit. This merely hides the way ideology actually works to situate our perceptions, color our thoughts with what seem like moral intuitions, to make contradictions cohere as the expectations of us change as we shift between contexts and roles. To change policy, as Waldman suggests in his most recent post, a "better approach would be to understand the way in which the theory might in fact be true and useful, and to craft a morality tale that both captures what is accurate in the story and leads to more productive and just intuitions about how we should behave."
That post focuses on ideological notions about work and prosperity and how production is valued. Lots of ideological questions in economics can be resolved into ideas about value -- how it is defined, created, measured, justly distributed. It seems like common sense (something somebody wants has value, right?), but Marx, for one, wrote several tomes trying to get to the bottom of it (Theories of Surplus Value, Grundrisse, Capital) that seemed only to make the issue more obscure. (See this article by Anders Ramsay for more on Wertgegenständlichkeit vs. Verausgabung.) Usually it just gets postulated as equivalent to GDP, to growth, which raises the issue of whether GDP captures public well-being. Growth is only as good for society as the distribution of it is held to be just. That's the substance of another endless ideological battle over what are fair returns to various kinds of property and labor.
The debate about what the financial industry produces is about whether they create value/growth, or merely shift money around to their own benefit. And who needs to be coddled to help the economy create more value -- capital or labor? Further questions arise when you look at how value changes as goods circulate. Does consumption create value in any socially meaningful way, or does it destroy it, as the word consumption implies? What is the relation of value to price? Is work valuable in and of itself to workers?
These ideological questions obviously shape the macroeconomic story that gets told. Conservatives tend to tell a story about the economy that stresses "structural unemployment" (unemployment is the result of skills mismatch, not a cyclical lack of aggregate demand for goods and services) and overconsumption during bubbles (the wrong sorts of people spent too much on things they didn't deserve to have). They extend no pity to those overconsumers who suffer (losing their jobs, homes, etc.) in recessions they regard as necessary to clear the debt overhang and forestall inflation.
Economist Karl Smith points out that it makes no sense to punish overconsumption with unemployment but goes too far, in Waldman's view, when he suggests, as many liberals tend to, that prosperity is a matter of full employment, the most people making the most stuff.
Waldman, attempting a sort of synthesis of Austrian and Keynesian views, responds by basically questioning the nature of the "value" of work: is it in the products they make, or is it a matter of keeping people busy and allowing them to feel as though what they do is socially meaningful? "We should never, ever measure prosperity in terms of consumption, but always in terms of production, weighted, importantly, by the strength of financial arrangements that allow us to convert unconsumed production into credible options to consume later." That is, production that can be turned into and out of savings without losing too much value. (This relates to the issues of overproduction or miscalculation, of an economy making stuff people don't want down the road.) Waldman continues, "However, we do not measure prosperity in terms of how much work people are doing. That is a terrible error and the most vulgar form of Keynesianism. Make-work is not a path to prosperity, and effort is not production." Effort has to make something that can be exchanged to qualify as production -- it has to be "socially necessary" in some sense. Someone must want to consume it. (The question usually debated is whether the government can be that someone.)
Then Waldman gets to what I see as the crux of the matter:
Employment is a more complicated issue than output. Under current (foolish) institutional and ideological arrangements, for most people, employment is our main source of claims on current or future production, and also a measure of our respectability and value as human beings.... The degree to which the production of any given thing is tethered to traditional employment is variable and technology dependent, and the ability to confer value through purchase could be distributed via means other than employment. Employment and prosperity are different things.What's revealed here is a sort of neutron-bomb mentality built into our received ideas of prosperity. We measure prosperity in prices, which stem from buying, not making or even consuming things. Value is ultimately assigned not but what people do or use but by what they are willing to pay for. Human effort, human being, has nothing to do with value -- despite our sentimental moral attachment to hard work, and our hedonistic delight in consumption.
We measure prosperity by production, not by work, and we measure production by value, by what people are willing to pay for what is produced.
That seems to vindicate the worst aspect of consumerism, that what we buy is more important to the grand scheme of things than what we do, which is important only insofar as it it gives us purchasing power. But this is the implicit ideology of the wage system, which makes all forms of work commensurable; this is the "foolish arrangement" that makes employment the "main source of claims on production." Consumerism -- a society devoted to circulating goods for the sheer sake of their circulation, which produces "value" (where Marxist "valorization" occurs) -- inevitably follows from a system that abstracts labor from its context, from the satisfactions it supplies to the worker and from the needs it ultimately satisfies. Consumerist values -- novelty, convenience, daydreaming, vicariousness, passivity, obsessive collecting -- all follow from this.
When Waldman suggests that "the ability to confer value through purchase could be distributed via means other than employment," he seems to be hinting at the possibility of a social wage, of something akin to universal welfare payments -- an idea almost unthinkable in the current ideological environment. But it may be the only way we escape a system that reduces all forms of value to expressions of individual consumer preference and that allows us to conceive of prosperity without people doing anything.
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