Friday, July 07, 2017
The
Fortress World of Capitalism vs. the Beautiful Possibilities of Cooperation
Building a sustainable world in these very quickly changing
times requires that we understand clearly what we are up against
Our beloved world is entering an increasingly unstable period,
full of dangers and also full of possibilities. In many countries, old
political parties are crumbling faster and anyone thought imaginable. Old
geopolitical alliances have come unglued as the US comes to exercise its role
as world hegemon in new and unpredictable ways. The development of the
internet, of mobile phones and of apps has led to incredible disruption of many
aspects of many societies: from how we pay for and listen to music, to how we
consume and propagate information and news, to how we shop for almost anything.
All that is solid is melting into air.
At this crossroads it is possible that the global community will
move in the direction that the dominant social forces seem to be pushing us
towards. That possibility has been called “fortress world.” It is a world where
we continue to burn fossil fuels and destroy the atmosphere; where climate
refugees desperate to leave Africa are forced by military means to stay in a
continent with a decreasing ability to produce food; where finance capital
fashions a “market” that continue to squeeze working class people to into
extreme poverty; where xenophobia rises in the wealthier countries and keeps
masses of people voting for politicians who serve the masters of an extractive
and unequal economy. That fortress world is a real possibility and the election
of Donald Trump is certainly a sign that this worse future may be on the way.
But it is also possible to build a future where fossil fuels are
phased out very quickly, where the political forces that oppose the domination
of finance capital come to win elections, and where we work hard to create an
economy where no one needs to work very hard.
The technical solutions to the climate crisis are already well
at hand. Renewable energy is now economically competitive with fossil fuels,
and alternatives to dirty technologies have emerged in virtually every sector
of production. The problem of poverty and wealth is also an easy one to solve
on a technical level. The world produces enough food to feed everyone, and our
technology has developed to the point where we can meet our needs with very
little work.
To give one simple illustration of how within reach a better
life for all is: take the total personal income in the United States. Divide it
by the number of people, and multiply by four. It turns out that the average
family of four could have $220,000 per year to live on if we had income
equality. Imagine raising minimum wages, taxing the wealthy, and
providing a guaranteed minimum income as ways of distributing that income.
Imagine reducing work hours so that, as productivity when up, work time could
go down, and work could be shared among those who needed an income. One of the
main arguments against this approach is that without the profit incentive our
technology would not develop. Imagine worker owner cooperatives developing
better ways of doing things and sharing the wealth that comes from those
developments with the people who work on them.
A new wave of automation is about to hit the world’s economies
so hard that millions of service jobs will be lost in the coming period. People
are starting to talk about the need for a guaranteed minimum income to deal
with that displacement. If that wave hits the US with the current political
consensus in place, it will mean another giant step toward the fortress world,
as some people profit enormously while others have no access of the means to
survive.
Karl Marx believed that as it became easy to meet our needs
through the high level of productivity of the machines we used, the time would
be right to get rid of capitalism and move to an economy based on the principle
of “from everyone according to their ability, to everyone according to their
needs.” It seems clear that we have reached that point. And is it just as clear
that those who profit from the current system will not willingly fall by the
wayside and let the rest of us live in peace and reap the rewards of our
prosperity, even though that prosperity was made possible by the collective
wisdom and hard work of the human species.
Are we now on the edge of a world where people are able to meet
their needs without the exploitation of labor that leads to the enrichment of a
few? There is much talk in the present period of an emerging “sharing economy”
where people share what they have with each other, and need to buy less, and
hopefully therefore work less, and use fewer natural resources. That idea holds
much promise, but it has been hijacked by the titans of the Silicon Valley,
whose bold new ideas all fit within the tired old paradigm of profit
maximization.
The people at the top of our new tech economy, who are often
seen as brilliant and creative, who love the concept of disruption, often
operate as if they had the puniest imaginations possible. We are used to
thinking of people like Steve jobs, Jeff Bezos, Sergei Brin, Larry
Page, Travis Kalanick, Larry Ellison, and Mark
Zuckerberg as enormously creative. And yet theirs is the creativity of the
puzzle master. Put them in front of a video game and they figure out how to win
it. Give them an engineering problem and they use their technical brilliance to
come up with new ideas.
And yet when it comes to the social side of their visions, there
is only one game they play, and one path to winning, and that is the game
called “the one who dies with the most toys wins.” It is as if they studied
engineering in college but never took a social sciences or humanities class. If
you study philosophy, you learn to question underlying assumptions, to see the
implications of points of view, to question the walls of the paradigms in which
we think. The titans of the Silicon Valley do indeed question and wonder and
create and overturn, but none of them has done anything remotely interesting
having to do with the capitalist context in which their work takes place.
The period most analogous to our own is the 1920s when
inequality was so severe it almost led to a revolution in the US. At that time
the economy was dominated by a few robber barons. People like Carnegie and Rockefeller
became fabulously wealthy off the backs of working people, drove out
competition through monopolistic practices, and tried to buy the public’s good
favor by engaging in high profile philanthropy.
Google’s primary purpose has become to sell ads. The same is
true of Facebook. Amazon is one of the worst employers of labor in the
industrialized world. Uber has made its money by avoiding regulation and
stripping workers of protections that took over a hundred years for the working
class to build. Imagine if anyone of them had anything as their ultimate goal
besides amassing wealth?
I remember a time in the 1990s when discussions were raging
about the future of the internet. At that time I saw an ad that said “become a
tollbooth on the information superhighway.” That was my first glimpse of the
dystopian reality to come. Before that, the internet was a space of creativity
and of very little money making. Critics of the growing commercialization of
the internet reminded us that in its early days, radio had had an amazingly
utopian element to it, where there were a multitude of small radio stations
which were widely different, and quirky, and full of character. Then, over time
the airwaves become dominated by a few large corporations which homogenized the
content to squeeze maximum profit from it. The same thing happened with
television, which in its early days was full of creativity and variety. In the
1990’s there was talk about how the emerging technologies could either lead to
a better world for all, or could become just another vector for increasingly
monopolized capital.
In the early days of the internet there was a strong community
of techno utopians who were developing tools that they thought would serve
human society. The developers of Linux created an operating system whose code
was open so anyone could modify it and expand it, but no one could own it. That
system still underlies much of the internet. Firefox was formed as a non-profit
and its services are some of the best in use. The non-profit search engine Duck
Duck Go doesn’t track you and so doesn't accumulate information for advertisers
to use to target you more efficiently, or for the government to track what you
are interested in. Creative Commons has come up with licensing systems to allow
people to share information and technology without anyone being able to
privatize those things that creators have deemed shareable but not saleable.
There is a lot of talk these days about the sharing economy. In
anti-capitalist circles there is increasing talk of the development of a
solidarity economy, based on meeting human needs within ecological limits
through detaching from consumer culture, developing worker owned cooperatives,
supporting patient capital that invests for social benefits, and sharing what
we have so we don’t all need to buy as much. Until recently, the idea of a
sharing economy was an important part of any vision of a solidarity economy. It
was a utopian vision of a world where people would find ways to share what they
had without anyone profiting and with no one’s labor being exploited. The hope
was that we would all rely less on money, on wage labor, or on capitalists.
For the titans of the Silicon Valley, and increasingly in
mainstream culture, the sharing economy has meant almost the opposite. It means
the monetization of ever more aspects of our lives. My home becomes a possible
source of profit for Air B and B. My need for a bit of labor, because I
can’t lift heavy objects, and someone else’s ability to pick those things up who
has a bit of time, becomes a source of profit for Task Rabbit. My car and time
and your need for a ride become a source of profit for Uber. In all of these
cases, we are “sharing,” our homes, our time, and our cars. But the nice
relations between the owner of the room that is Air B and B’d and the traveler
who gets to stay in a nice homey place, is mediated by a company whose only
interest in the interaction is profit making. That company hires armies of
lawyers to fight any community initiatives to protect society from the negative
consequences of this “sharing” relationship.
Imagine a real sharing economy, where something like Uber is set
up to facilitate the matching of drivers and riders where the drivers got the
profits. Imagine something like Air B and B, where a platform was developed
that took into account the needs of communities to not have housing taken out
of the rental market and put into commercial use, but instead limited its use
to people sharing their homes when they didn’t need them. What if platforms
developed that respected labor and environmental laws, because its developers
saw themselves as providing a service rather than as trying to win the game of
the one who dies with the most toys wins?
In his pamphlet “Platform Cooperatives: Challenging the
Corporate Sharing Economy," Trebor Scholz shares the outlines of what it
would take to develop technological platforms that served human needs without
involving exploitation. He also shares inspiring examples of real experiments
in platform coopertativism. Worker owner cooperatives can be formed with tech
workers who develop and maintain the platforms as coop members, along with the
others, such as the drivers and laborers.
The creativity that has been put into the game of being the one
who dies with the most toys, needs instead to be put into finding ways to keep
capitalist forms of exploitation from destroying the new world we want to
build. The titans of Silicon Valley need to be seen as leaders of the dash
toward fortress world rather than as purveyors of anything that is new in any
important way.
The future that is livable belongs to the coder who can code our
new platform cooperatives. It belongs to those willing to fight to take down
the pirates of finance capital. It belongs to those who are willing to fight
for systems of democracy that hold power to account and limits the abilities of
politicians to gain power based on fanning the flames of fear in a world whose
instability does engender fear.
It seems that the term sharing economy has been so corrupted by
its association with exploitative for profit platforms that it probably needs
to be abandoned. Those arguing for the emergence of non-capitalist alternatives
have gravitated to the term solidarity economy to describe the non-capitalist
economic initiatives that are emerging, and it seems that platform
cooperativism is a good term for those technologically mediated forms of
solidarity economy that serve human needs and help build a sustainable future.
Building a sustainable world in these very quickly changing
times requires that we understand clearly what we are up against. It also
requires that we work hard to develop alternative visions of that better would
and are cognizant of the small steps needed to get there. Building platform
cooperativism seems like an urgent part of that proces
This work
is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
Cynthia Kaufman is
the author of Getting Past
Capitalism: History, Vision, Hope and Ideas for
Action: Relevant Theory for Radical Change. She is the
Director of the Vasconcellos Institute for Democracy in Action at
De Anza College. She blogs at cynthiakaufman.wordpress.com.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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