Analysis Two: "Jobs," a Rhetorical Red Herring

      
          In discussing the “qualitative transformation” of capitalism and its social consequences, Thomas A. Hirschl cites Marx’s theory that “an era of social revolution begins when the technological capacity of society supersedes or becomes too productive for the existing property relations” (158).  Technological innovation fervently continues, though, so in the interest of separating social and economic crises from their roots in information and technological capitalism, leaders strategically employ political rhetoric.  This is hardly more apparent elsewhere than in political debates, particularly the second Presidential Debate of 2012.  Nearly the entire debate was directed at the homogenized entity of the “middle class” and the need to “create jobs.”  Both candidates briefly reference technological innovation, but their overall avoidance of the role of information and technology in their supposed quest for jobs is like a pink elephant in the room—they talk all around it, obliquely alluding to it, without acknowledging the massive amount of space it occupies and its undeniable impact.  By limiting the depth of their discussion to expansive, vague references to "jobs," they avoid addressing the relationship between capitalism, technology, and structural unemployment.  This, in turn, shapes public discourse so that the recent economic crisis is seen in isolation, not as evidence of an accelerating trend with dire social consequences, and, in turn, neither candidate’s role and stake in serving this trend is exposed.

In their respective essays in the 1997 collection, Cutting Edge, Hirschl, Guglielmo Carchedi, and Ramin Ramtin address the economic and social malady of their time, a prescient description that anticipates the very situation addressed by Messrs. Obama and Romney fifteen years later.  The first question posed to the candidates does not specifically refer to technology, but neither does it mention the word “jobs” (what the college student actually asks is how he will be able to sufficiently support himself after he graduates).  Neither candidate addresses what Carchedi identifies as a crisis of capitalist social relations, “the relations between the owners and the nonowners of the means of production,” due to technological innovation (74).  Rather than delve into this unattractive reality, both candidates immediately respond to the question with effusive references to jobs—four for Mr. Romney and seven for Mr. Obama.  The moderator encourages this direction by following up with, “What about those long-term unemployed who need a job right now?”  Here, the candidates continue to sidestep a social and economic discussion of quality of life and reasonable self-sufficiency, of the purpose of education and the direction of the country, and become immersed in the realm of stop-gap measures and band-aids.  Mr. Obama speaks of “good-paying jobs” in the “private sector” and manufacturing jobs in the automobile industry, and Mr. Romney says, “I want you to be able to get a job.”  This rhetoric of avoidance does not explore the systemic expansion of labor-saving technologies and their consequences in a capitalist society—specifically, that technologies initially increase capitalist accumulation at the expense of laborers’ decreased purchasing power, which then results in less profits and an increased drive toward labor-saving technology.  This, in turn, results in less jobs, and the spiral continues (Carchedi 75).  Without identifying this pervasive and accelerating cycle of capitalist (self)destruction, both candidates effectively avoid proposing the radical economic and social changes necessary to interrupt this cycle, and thus, neither candidate can propose an adequate approach.

Further, only when pressed on foreign outsourcing and competition with China does either candidate finally broach the topic of information and technology.  Mr. Romney asserts, “China’s been cheating over the years … by stealing our intellectual property; our designs, our patents, our technology,” and Mr. Obama explains, “There are some jobs that are not going to come back.  Because they are low wage, low skill jobs.  I want high wage, high skill jobs … That’s why we have to invest in advanced manufacturing.”  Both candidates imply that technology plays a serious role in economic health (something markedly absent from their initial discussion of “jobs”), and they suggest that they would protect and develop technology to protect and develop jobs.  Neither addresses that these very advances in information and manufacturing technology only heighten socioeconomic polarization by delimiting the types of employment available.  The few laborers who are incorporated in advanced manufacturing work or as knowledge workers “are often in a position to share in their nation’s privileged position” (Hirschl 164), while the rest, in increasing numbers, become casualties.

Contrary to either politician’s stance, the source of these material and social consequences cannot be denied, nor can it be reduced to an inexplicable lack of jobs.  Joblessness is a symptom of a malady, but the palliative measure of treating a symptom without treating the problem does nothing to heal the person.  Ramin Ramtin explains, “The insecurity of capitalist conditions of labor has always acted as a powerful means of social control—but only because and as long as there is at least some hope of future employment” (247).  In emphasizing the creation of jobs without addressing the long-term and systemic reasons for unemployment, these politicians perpetuate that increasingly unfounded hope for future employment.  Consequently, they manage, if only temporarily, to hold on to their positions of power in a spiraling capitalist system. 

Works Cited
Carchedi, Guglielmo.  “High-Tech Hype: Promises and Realities of Technology in the Twenty-

First Century.” Davis, et al.  73-86.

Davis J., T. Hirschl, and M. Stack, eds.  Cutting Edge: Technology, Information, Capitalism                and Social Revolution.  London: Verso, 1997.  Print.
Hirschl, Thomas.  “Structural Unemployment and the Qualitative Transformation of Capitalism.”

Davis, et al.  157-174.

Ramtin, Ramin.  “A Note on Automation and Alienation.” Davis, et al.  243-251.
“Second Presidential Debate Full Transcript.”  ABC News.  WABC, Los Angeles, 16 Oct.      
            2012.  Television. Transcript.  abcnews.go.com.  Web.

Oligopolizing Freedom: the Social Reality of “Free” Trade and the “Free” Flow of Information

     Arguing against “freedom” now is like arguing against cuddly puppies, sunsets, and unique, beautiful snowflakes.  It is anathema to a progressive perspective.  But that is because freedom has been co-opted by political rhetoric.  Rather than express autonomy and lack of constraints, freedom has come to include particular social, economic, and political implications which are not readily apparent, but which ineluctably detract from the instantiation of the very term which houses them.  So I do not take issue with freedom; what I do take issue with is the couching of oligopolistic capitalism, the stifling of cultures, and the suppression of individual liberty through the selective dissemination of information within the fallacious claim that it is all in the service of freedom.   Two inextricably-related instances of this arise in the rhetoric of agricultural “free” trade and of “supporters of the ‘free’ flow of information” (Schiller 71).

From the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, May 2005:

Farmers in the United States, Canada, and Mexico all benefit from NAFTA.

• Two-way agricultural trade between the United States and Mexico increased 149 percent since 1993.  Two-way agricultural trade between the United States and Canada increased 112 percent since 1993.

Although U.S. imports have grown under NAFTA, so have U.S. exports.  Without NAFTA, the United States would have lost these expanded export opportunities.

In 2004, exports of numerous key U.S. commodities set records to both countries:

• Canada:  fresh vegetables, fresh fruits, snack foods, poultry meat, pet foods, vegetable oils, planting seeds, breakfast cereals, tree nuts, nursery products, rice, soybean meal, processed fruits and vegetables, juices and eggs.

• Mexico:  red meats, processed fruits and vegetables, poultry meat, fresh vegetables, tree nuts, wheat, soybean meal, animal fats, dairy products and rice.  This broad cross section of commodities suggests the benefits of NAFTA are widely distributed across U.S. agriculture.

Import competition has increased under NAFTA for some commodities, a not unexpected development, as trade barriers begin to come down and trade is subject to open marketing conditions.  As the largest of the NAFTA countries and with a booming economy, it is not surprising that U.S. imports from Canada have grown strongly, providing American consumers with a broader array of competitively priced, high-quality products.[1]

     

Although the above is only an excerpt, the FAS maintains an implicit theme in its explication of the benefits of the North American Free Trade Agreement: that if the United States benefits from the agreement, so too, must everyone else.  The U.S.'s supposed benefits, however, are predicated on a few particular economic occurrences and are not in any way attached to commensurate benefits for either Canada or Mexico.  Is it enough that Americans are provided with "a broader array of competitively priced, high-quality products" (FAS)?  Should we stop there, or should we read  between the lines just a little more? 

Otero, Scott, and Gilbreth do indeed read between the lines in their essay on neoliberalized global trade.  In particular, they explain the social consequences for the actual people of Mexico, something the FAS, in its emphasis on U.S. economic benefits, neglects to address.  For Mexican peasants and rural farmers, “free” trade means trading according to the dictates of the country with the most money, and this in turn, means shifting their own agricultural system to suit such trade.  One such consequence is “unemployment in cities that are unable to provide enough jobs for those expelled from the modernizing agricultural sector” (Otero, et al. 255).  Further, what the FAS claims as a benefit (at least for the United States, but presumably for Mexico as well) is the massive increase in U.S. exports of certain foodstuffs, the details of which are cited above. 

Otero, et al. give the lie to the social implications of this factoid, however, when they delineate the real-life consequences of such expansive and “free” trade. The United States must create a demand in Mexico for its products, and it does so by “promoting modern agriculture and a U.S.-style diet [which] has involved the displacement of subsistence crops like corn and beans, grown for human consumption” in favor of growing feed for livestock.  This conveniently creates a demand for foreign food products, and the United States can step right in and provide that.  Consequently, “Mexican consumption patterns are still moving in the direction of greater amounts of meat and dairy products, and fewer local grains and products” ),  while Americans are eating increasing amounts of whole grains and low-fat and –cholesterol products (Otero, et al. 256.  Here, “free” trade effectively constrains and shapes the direction of an entire group of people physically and culturally. 

Dan Schiller presents a striking parallel in his analysis of digital capitalism and the political and economic interests in the “free” flow of information.  The overt message is that if information flows freely (without government dictating what is available and how it can be accessed), the people will be able to democratically access information via advanced technology and decide for themselves how they will explore and with what they will engage.  Such a proposition is incontrovertible.  I certainly do not want my government, which purportedly serves me, to dictate my access to knowledge and information.  What is not made explicit, though, is that in place of the government, the “free” flow of information is actually the very strategic dissemination of very specific information via very constrained points of access.  Such limitations are enforced by corporate interests who are now “free” to use their expansive financial means and business alliances to package information in ways which sustain and increase their profits. 

Just as free trade in practice limits trade for those who must now play by one, highly unbalanced, set of rules, so too does the notion of freely flowing information mask the diminishing availability of democratically accessible information. Further, both of these “freedoms” serve each other: with the not-so-free flow of information, the few who benefit from free trade can bolster their dominance by manipulating how the system is viewed, and by capitalizing on an imbalanced trade system, they maintain the wherewithal to continue shaping the consumption of information.  Freedom in the service of the few at the expense of the many is not freedom.  Instead it is more closely aligned with “free reign” (as opposed to free rein), and if our grade-school history books have taught us anything, there are dangerous social consequences behind the exercise of free reign.

Works Cited

Otero, Gerardo, Steffanie Scott, and Chris Gilbreth.  “New Technologies, Neoliberalism, and

Social Polarization in Mexico’s Agriculture.” Cutting Edge: Technology, Information,

Capitalism and Social Revolution.  Ed. Jim Davis, et al.  London: Verso, 1997.  253-270.  Print.

Schiller, Dan.  Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System.  Cambridge: MIT

Press, 2000. Print.

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[1] “FAS Backgrounder: Benefits of NAFTA.” USDA Foreign Agricultural service.  May 2005.  www.fas.usda.gov.  24 October 2012.  Web. 

Genetic Engineering and the Fate of the "Social Factory"

     In the following scene from Andrew Niccol’s 1997 Gattaca, Vincent Freeman’s parents are looking to conceive their second child with the aid of genetic engineering.  Having forewent this when conceiving Vincent, his life expectancy was determined at birth to be 30.2 years, and his blood alone told the doctors he was ninety-nine percent likely to develop a congenital heart condition among other deleterious mental and physical dispositions.

            I first viewed this film several years after it was released, and I was more incredulous at the technology itself than with the ethics of the technology.  When it first came out, I was eleven years old and busy trying to change my nature to suit society’s dictates all on my own. By the time I encountered Gattaca, I was struck by the futility of my own and Vincent’s efforts to circumvent nature.  I did not consider the possibility that both Vincent and I were already perfectly ourselves.  Now, a decade later, and with the help of other thinkers who encourage the challenging of these ossified beliefs, I can’t help but reconsider the social, economic, and political conditions behind this fictional account, and more importantly, behind my own experience.

            Nick Witheford’s “Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism” is an excellent foundation for reconsidering this film.  He begins by defining the Autonomist Marxian term, the “social factory,” as extending “class conflict [to] include not only waged labor but also all the unwaged workers, such as housewives, students, and the unemployed” (197).  With this premise, no one in society (either my own or the “futuristic” one Vincent inhabits) is free from participating in the capitalist system of oppression—we are capitalists, laborers, and/or reproducers of laborers.  Witheford goes on to explain that one way “capital” retains control of the people is through their physical bodies, and in particular, through “the biopolitics of reproducing labor power” (215).  Specifically, he writes, “Although genetic engineering is generally publicized a means of curing hereditary diseases, its main achievements are currently neither therapeutic nor even diagnostic but predictive … it offers a way, not of healing, but of targeting subjects with an alleged predisposition to costly disease” (Witheford  215). 

The film takes this hidden motive of capital’s development of technology and presents it as an overt and socially accepted means for ensuring individual greatness.  What this raises, and what Witheford so articulately exposes, is the question of what this technology really means in the lives of actual people.  For Vincent, his parents had the means and the choice to produce a genetically engineered child, and they chose not to for moral reasons.  They learned from that “mistake” and endeavored to have a more wholesome child the second time around.  So Vincent is portrayed almost as a tragedy, being born with social, physical, and mental “handicaps.”  But he is not alone, there is a whole segment of the population without the wherewithal to avail themselves of genetic engineering, so in being more and more likely to reproduce the physical and mental traits that relegate them to a lower class, they reproduce themselves as a class.  The economics of technology supports social and political oppression, and this is how the social factory works. 

Although contemporary capitalist society has not quite reached this degree of technological oppression, we are quite close, and the closer we come to believing that this is the path toward greatness and “freedom” from limitations, the farther we go from being whole people.  This, in turn, will only make it easier to further segment and separate us, pitting laborer against laborer, social being against social being, effectively precluding any unified retaliatory effort.

Witheford, Nick. “Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism.” Cutting

Edge: Technology, Information, Capitalism and Social Revolution.  Ed. Jim

Davis, et al.  London: Verso, 1997.  195-242.  Print.

Serving the System: The Fate of the Worker in an Economy of “Labor-Saving” Technology

            I haven’t been able to work for three weeks.  As a part-time server at a local, non-corporate BBQ restaurant, have no delusions that the labor I provide is unique or irreplaceable, and I’m sure my managers have found some other employees to pick up the slack while my broken hand heals.  But, in addition to tightening my budget for the month and worrying if I will actually retain my position, I also began thinking about what it is I actually do.  While reading Dwight D. Murphey’s article, “Robotics: A Route to the Survival of Advanced Societies” and C. George Caffentzis’ “Why Machines Cannot Produce Value,” I began thinking about how my job, what I do, is tied to technology and how that relationship effects and directs the course of my life and my other relationships. 

Murphey proposes that a viable remedy for the crisis of developed nations’ efforts to compete with low-cost labor is to develop and rely on labor-saving capital, to effectively employ capital instead of people.  He claims: “If the advanced economies move further into robotics and other such technologies, that will itself address the deindustrialization and hollowing-out we have noted by making their industry competitive both with cheap labor and other nations’ advanced technology.  They will be putting their capital to work rather than exporting it” (417).  Caffentzis, on the other hand, asserts quite the opposite: that all capital, including technological capital, cannot produce value, so capitalists are reluctant to invest in new technologies.  Technology only becomes attractive to capitalists as a means for working with the workers they already have and as an alternative to “find[ing] a completely new sector of the working class to exploit” (33) which is becoming increasingly difficult.  In other words, technology supports the continued exploitation of labor to extract surplus value.  Without extracting surplus value from the laborer, there is no profit, and further, without the laborer-as-consumer, products will not be sold and profits will disappear.

So which is it?  Will increased technology enable competition with cheap labor, replacing the need for most types of labor, thus freeing individuals from the work they don’t want to do anyway (Murphey 412)?  Or will increased technology lead to “an increase, not a decrease in work” (Caffentzis 31), albeit different types of work and, in particular, different means of exploitation?  Reflecting on my own job, I am inclined to go with the latter.  Yes, it is true that the technological capital “employed” at the restaurant enable me to accomplish my tasks far more expeditiously without a commensurate increase in wages, thus creating greater profits, and it could be said that this is not necessarily an unacceptable form of exploitation since it supposedly makes my own job easier.  But what it also does is effectively chain me to the technology developed to help me, and I lose more and more of myself in the process.

Specifically, as a service worker, my job is to facilitate consumption, and this insight was reinforced last night during an interaction with a Starbucks “barista."  Rather than gathering resources and producing products, we use the technology provided, acting as mediums between the technology and the material product and the material product and the consumer.  Without technology at this point, we would not be able help the consumer consume.  We do not have the skills to work in any other way than within the parameters defined by technology.  In effect, we lose whole parts of ourselves, whole ranges of ability, as we are funneled into performing tasks directly dependent on technology.  In fact, the only (limited) agency we have is in how we enact the transaction.  The barista was amused by some of my comments and said I was the most interesting customer he had experienced all day.  I said that was good to know, but thought to myself, “all day, he is so limited by his enslavement to technology that he rarely gets to be his human self, so much so that he relishes any extemporaneous, unscripted interaction.”  I then thought of my own job and how limited I am by the services I provide.  Although these limitations are materially different than the limitations experienced by laborers in technologically-poor industries and countries, psychologically, they have a similar effect.  I become what my job wants me to be, and I lose myself in the process.

Technology, then, is not the savior of the laborer.  It is just another means to enslave the laborer, to exploit her.  I do not have a suggested savior in its place, but I am thinking about it and questioning what I have for so long accepted uncritically.   There has to be a way for technology to foster the humanness of the laborer rather than dehumanizing her under the pretense of “liberating” her from labor.

             

Caffentzis, C. George.  “Why Machines Cannot Create Value; or Marx’s Theory of Machines.” 

Cutting Edge: Technology, Information, Capitalism and Social Revolution.  Ed. Jim

Davis, et al.  London: Verso, 1997.  29-56.  Print.

Murphey, Dwight D.  “Robotics: A Route to the Survival of Advanced Societies?” The Journal

of Social, Political, and Economic Studies.  32:4 (2007): 397-420.  ProQuest.  Web.  7 October 2012.

Has Capitalism Subsumed Communism? Free Labor in a Capitalist Society

            To be sure, pure capitalism and pure communism cannot coexist, but with the rise of information-based labor, the very foundations of our capitalist society have drastically changed.  Tiziana Terranova cites Richard Barbrook in terming this a “mixed economy.”  For Barbrook, “the future of capitalism lies in the commodification of information,” but at the same time, “money-commodity relations play a secondary role to those created by a really existing form of anarcho-communism” in which laborers are free to “collaborate with each other without the direct mediation of money and politics” (qtd. in Terranova n.p.). 

Looking at the breadth of choices in how we can “work” and/or “play” with the information available to us, Barbrook’s suggestion appears apposite.  It involves a division between informational work and play, where one is allotted to sustaining capitalist pursuits and the other toward an antithetical, “high-tech gift economy” which will “overcom[e] capitalism from the inside” (Terranova).  In this way, users’ appropriation and consumption of information technologies for their own personal ends subverts the capitalist aim of commodifying those technologies, and this can be seen as a communistic counter to the capitalist machine. 

For Terranova, however, it is possible to see these seemingly disparate and oppositional forces operating dialectically.  At times one appears to subvert the other, but all along, they are blending, conversing, and transacting as they develop and sustain an evolving economy.  She describes free labor not as exploited, but rather as voluntary and participatory.

It is just as possible, though, that another alternative has come to be: namely that informational “play” and free labor appear to undermine capitalism by promoting the voluntary and unpaid, but "free" exchange of ideas and connection.  This cannot be so.  It does not account for the extreme limitations placed upon users in terms of what they can access to play with, in terms of what is made available to them.  Yes, users are free to choose from an apparent wealth of information, but as Webster explains, “information will … be produced and made available only where it has the prospect of being sold at a profit” (135).  On the surface, this seems incorrect: once users gain access to the information network, they can consume as much and whichever information they choose.  However, based on “market criteria” (Webster 135), only certain kinds of information are available.  Worse yet, the plethora of options simply deludes users into thinking they are choosing from all there is to choose from, rather than realizing that they are choosing from a very select set of options predetermined by corporate interests.  We are free to consume as we please, but only what they choose to put forth.  Even personal Youtube clips and blogs, seemingly independent of profit-making in their voluntary and free nature, actually support the narrowing of our information options and the maintenance of a capitalist system.  Further, although users are free to access whatever they choose, it is implicit that they must first gain access.  Could it be that hegemonic forces are not concerned with the details of what users freely consume as long as they pay into the existing system of information consumption?

There are, of course, strategies to overtly undermine the commodification of information, but all of these require buying into the system in the first place, and do not necessarily involve direct intervention in the path of technological innovation.  Until the powers (particularly, the funding) for innovation are stripped from a narrow set of corporate and political interests and made available more democratically, our “free labor” will continue to be exploited without our really knowing it; capitalism will pretend to tolerate communism even as it feasts upon it.

Terranova, Tiziana.  “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy.”  London, 2003.

http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/technocapitalism/voluntary. Web.

Webster, Frank.  Theories of the Information Society.  3^rd Ed. Routledge: London, 2006.  Print.