Center for a Stateless Society Media Coordinator Tom Knapp, summarizing his experience with the Occupy St. Louis movement, reported a movement “with an ideological center of gravity somewhere in the neighborhood of ‘mild reform Democrat.’” Most of the people there, apparently, were basically Coffee Party people with better signs and slogans.
They’re probably not representative of the nationwide Occupy Together movement — the vibe coming from Occupy Wall Street, at least, is a lot more like Seattle. But there really is a contradiction in the movement between those who see it as part of a larger process of creating a new kind of society, and those who see it primarily as a source of pressure on the state to revive the New Deal or Social Democratic model.
Doug Henwood of the Left Business Observer recently described the agenda — “Jobs for All” — unanimously approved by the OWS Demands Working Group (LBO News, October 20). “The anarchists are not happy about this,” he writes, “and are trying to block its adoption by the General Assembly.”
Henwood makes no bones about his support for the agenda, encouraging readers who agree with him to make their support felt. As for those who don’t like it, “please reflect on the size of the potential constituency for this agenda compared with that for your own.”
Among the expedients for “creating jobs” is a massive project to “rebuild infrastructure” — an approach well-loved by the Michael Moore “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party, but fundamentally antagonistic to the portion of the movement with a more or less anarchistic vision of a post-corporate alternative economy.
The “Jobs for All” agenda is essentially a return to a greenwashed version of the centralized corporate-state Consensus Capitalism of the mid-20th century. That model relied on massive waste and capital investment boondoggles by the state to guarantee full utilization of capacity and full employment — the very pathologies of corporate capitalism that the folks at Monthly Review have been pointing to for years. Just leave the centralized, capital-intensive, bureaucratic structure of Galbraithian capitalism intact, and then let the state build a new (but greenwashed!) Interstate Highway System every ten years to keep it running at capacity. Then everybody can work forty hours a week at a “job” doing things at least half of which are the moral equivalent of digging holes and filling them back in again, in an economy organized by Rube Goldberg. It’s the world depicted in the movie “Brazil.”
In other words, we’ve got a bunch of “Leftists” who are nostalgic for retro capitalism.
It was subsidized infrastructure, as much as anything — starting with the railroad land grants of the 19th century — that was responsible for the pathological model of 20th century corporate capitalism: A system based on overaccumulation, capital intensiveness and high overhead, with the imperative of using subsidized waste, planned obsolescence and mass consumption to fully utilize capacity and keep the wheels turning. The mass production model itself — a model enabled by an activist state in alliance with big business — was inseparable from all the dysfunctional aspects of postwar corporate capitalism.
Those “roads and bridges?” The Interstate — created under the supervision of that great “progressive” Charlie Wilson, who said what’s good for GM is good for America — gave us suburban sprawl and enabled Wal-Mart’s big box/warehouses on wheels model to destroy Main Street.
There’s simply no way, in an economy with efficiently organized production, to employ 150 million people for 40 hours a week. Far better would be to eliminate all the subsidized waste, relocalize manufacturing with lean supply and distribution chains, adopt less capital-intensive and more flexible manufacturing processes, and adopt product designs for modularity, durability and ease of repair. The next steps would be to:
1) Eliminate the artificial property rights that are sources of rents, and allow market competition to flush out the embedded rents in the prices of goods and services, so that all the cost savings are transferred to the consumer;
2) Eliminate barriers to the shift of production from wage labor to the informal/household sector and to self-employment, wherever possible (and technological change is making it more efficient in a radically expanding portion of total production); and
3) Allow whatever wage labor remains to be evenly distributed through a shorter work week and job-sharing.
There’s a fundamental divide between those who want the state to prop up Corporate America in the interest of creating “jobs,” and those who want to kill off the whole job culture, the economic model by which we meet our needs through working at jobs provided by giant, hierarchical institutions.
In my opinion there’s no contest between them. As they said in the French General Strike forty years ago: “Be realistic: Demand the impossible.”
"2) Eliminate barriers to the shift of production from wage labor to the informal/household sector and to self-employment, wherever possible (and technological change is making it more efficient in a radically expanding portion of total production); and
3) Allow whatever wage labor remains to be evenly distributed through a shorter work week and job-sharing."
Could you be a bit more specific?
It's probably best not to call them the "OWS Demands Working Group," as they are unaffiliated with the OWS General Assembly: http://occupywallst.org/article/so-called-demands…
Could somebody turn this into a snazzy flier I can pass out at Occupy Richmond?
My recent post Do you love commerce?
Since this is causing a lot of bullshit noise: the GA decided there would be no demands working group on week 2. Thy have not been empowered by the GA. Someone who we thought was affiliated with them went to the media with ridiculous demands.
The claim that they adopted things unanimously ignores that they had people putting out blocks and two GA facilitators who left the meeting in disgust.
Kevin, every time I read an article by you, I follow the same pattern. First seven paragraphs or so–I think, "Hmm. Insightful. Good stuff. Want more." At around eight or nine, it starts to falter.
Here, you then lapse into what I call "grand design" solutions, as if you were arbiter of what others "should" do, with prescriptions for their actions and assumptions about the universal value of the results of such actions.
Why not just focus on eliminating the State (read: coercive) interventions which distort the otherwise unfettered actions of market participants, without then going on to say what those actions "should" be?
Since this is causing a lot of bullshit noise: the GA decided there would be no demands working group on week 2. Thy have not been empowered by the GA. Someone who we thought was affiliated with them went to the media with ridiculous demands. The NYCGA website is run by the internet working group, not the ows.org affinity group, which includes people in multiple working groups including PR and internet.
I think that the eventual downfall of corporate capitalism is immanent and the suggestions you give to quicken its demise are right on target.
These things must be instituted in our communities before we can expect them to be accepted on a wider basis. Go out and campaign to eliminate business licencing in your community. Licencing in general is detrimental to true free market and is elitist in its effect of closing certain kinds of businesses to all but those with the deepest pockets. I am a big promoter of Resilient Communities as a model of post corporate capitalism. We need to bring small scale, flexible manufacturing and production back to the local level. Grow your own food, generate your own power, and encourage others to do the same. Occupy Main Street!
I tend to agree with the article. In general decentralizing the vast majority of production is indeed positive, but let's not bash all infrastructure. High speed rail connecting the country together would be a public good great for almost everyone. And it's certainly preferable to maintain aging bridges before they collapse. Not to mention we're heading for another recession. Jobs might smooth that transition to a better future instead of increasing pain and instability.
My recent post Midnight EST deadline in Baltimore (and still stuff happening in Oakland)
brett: The barriers I'm thinking of are things like "safety" and "health" codes that prevent people using ordinary household capital goods they already own, zoning laws that require microproducers to rent stand-alone commercial real estate or restrict the agricultural use of residential property — basically everything that drives up the capital outlays and overhead of the small producer and effectively criminalizes small batch produciton.
Johnathan: I just can't stop myself. The trends I find so exhilarating, in which I see the demise of the corporate state, also appear to me as "the ends in process." The very things destroying the existing order are also demonstrating — if only "in a glass darkly" — the shape of the successor society.
My recent post New Book in the Works
I think that one mistake that many commentaries across the spectrum is in viewing the occupy movement as a discreet entity. I prefer to look at it as a virus…in other words, there is no "heart and soul" to battle over. This virus carries two simple messages TO INDIVIDUALS: First — we don't need anyone's permission to exercise our liberty (otherwise, it's merely a privilege). Second, WE ARE SOCIETY…we can configure ourselves into any sizes or shapes we choose — under any rules we choose (hopefully, within the NAP) — anywhere we choose. (I am convinced that this is one reason the founders of the movement have strongly resisted defining specific goals or making demands.) In any case, the current physical occupation sites (and even the current occupiers) are largely irrelevant — they are just vectors for the virus. Anarchists should already know that the "macro" problems of our world…concentration of power, exploitation, coercion will only be solved on a "nano" level…through intentional and voluntary interactions between and among individuals.
So (imho), it's up to us to add the DNA needed to create "heart and soul" through solid ethics AND to create "arms and legs" through practical everyday alternatives to the corporate-state, then to spread the virus. Nanarchism…if you will.
2) shift the allocation of capital by banks away from large centrally planned projects (billion dollar factories that squirt out a million widgets a day, thousand unit housing developments) to decentralized local production systems based on appropriate technology.
3) with individual productivity at an all time high, there just isn't enough work to go around anymore. spread the work over multiple individuals so you are replacing double digit unemployment with triple digit under-employment.
"As for those who don’t like it, “please reflect on the size of the potential constituency for this agenda compared with that for your own.”"
The size for a "jobs" constituency is only large because there are few other ways for a non-rich person to survive except "jobs" in the current economic system. But how many people really like their jobs? How many people would work their drone jobs if better alternatives were available? It's just that unemployment and not being able to buy the things you need COMBINED with not having any idea how long your unemployment will last (thus great uncertainty and worry about the future) is even worse than most of the jobs out there. If there was a better alternative to 40 hour or more weeks at drone labor the potential constituency is HUGE.
Actually, there is, but before I tell you how and why I should get a bit more specific about the definitions.
“Efficient” relates inputs to outputs as a ratio, and it is important to be using the same measures. The early, Tudor phase of the Enclosure of the Commons in England certainly led to more efficient use of land; that is, throwing out the peasants and turning the freed up land over to raising wool as a cash crop for export certainly raised the level of cash income per acre – probably close to the optimal level under the circumstances. Likewise, it raised the level of cash income per person in work, and even per person in the country (as an aggregate, with many going backwards), but not to the optimal level per person in the country – so it wasn’t the most efficient use of labour. Notice that this has nothing whatsoever to do with the wealth transfers from the displaced peasants to the wool growers and others; efficiency on its own just isn’t a measure that ever looks into that side of things.
Elsewhere, I and others have covered the likelihood that, if the economy and institutions were put right, things would converge to people working an average of 20 hours per week for their sustained subsistence (with seasonal variations), leaving the rest for leisure and personal interests, on the back of personal resources like land and capital they owned themselves – not too different to Distributism. That, after all, is the historical norm, and even extends to much animal life. Of course, with rents and taxes, or supporting children and the old and infirm, that average falls more heavily on a smaller group actively working.
However, that is once you reach a fairly steady state. Early settlers in North America probably averaged about that for their sustained subsistence, but observably they actually worked a lot more and harder. The rest was going on pioneering – clearing land, putting up buildings, making roads, etc., all because those things needed to be done to get to a more comfortable steady state.
Now, consider what would happen if we somehow got an economy with efficiently organised production tomorrow. That is, suppose we started doing things right but all the “stuff” was as it is today. There has been a lot of what Misesians call “malinvestment” under the faulty arrangements. Although it wouldn’t be virgin territory such as the North American pioneers faced, there would still be an analogue of pioneering to do – the putting right of things, as opposed to the putting right of arrangements. That might even extend to buying out the old, the way that emancipated Russian serfs were lumbered with a starting debt to pay off the landlords.
So we could well have an economy with efficiently organised production employing 150 million people for 40 hours per week – transitionally. And, if, we chose to have high levels of growth sustained indefinitely (if it could be done), that would continue indefinitely without converging to a steady state.
I have looked into some of this elsewhere, and, if people are interested, I can provide links.
Kevin,
I'm new to the site, and to many of the mind-blowing ideas presented here. So I hope you will excuse the innocence of my question:
Clearly we are approaching a time when the overwhelming majority of the economy runs on automatic through automation (i.e. there are no jobs left to do by humans). At the moment almost all of the proceeds of the increasingly automated economy are going to the "owners" and "renters", leaving more and more people unemployed and destitute. I had hoped, since I was a kid, that we would all benefit from this automated economy by having a full-fledged leisure society, where we no longer have to work to thrive. This is clearly not happening. Since you are against any centralized or state control, how could we get to and have a society where nobody needs to work anymore? I'm guesing some kind of decentralized p2p currency that gives everyone's existence (time, etc) inherent value (like the Human Credit), but I'm just guessing. This is a new area of thought for me, and I trying very hard to imagine the possibilities.
Paul, what’s tripping you up are the things you are still taking for granted that are actually effects of existing arrangements, the things you introduce as “clearly…”. But the things leading to downsizing like the indefinitely increasing automation you mention, and also outsourcing overseas, are driven by the separation of ownership from employment, labour market imperfections, etc. If those were fixed, say with a Distributist style end situation after a suitable transition such as the tax breaks on employers per employee that I have mentioned on this site before, your question goes away: all the proceeds would continue to go to the “owners” and “renters” (I think you meant “rentiers”) – but everybody would be far enough into that group to be helped, and the lack of distortions would also mean that many roles for people would remain or return (that is, people would only save their own labour if it suited them, just as people only switch to motor mowers if that suits).