| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="WebPreferences" |
|---|
|
|
<
< | First as Farce, Then as Tragedy |
>
> | To Understand Polarization, Look at the Software |
| | |
|
<
< | -- ShayBanerjee - 10 Feb 2017 |
>
> | -- ShayBanerjee - 6 May 2017 |
| | |
|
<
< | "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." |
>
> | It is no coincidence that workers most affected by automation are rejecting economic liberalism. Machines, after all, are not governed by market forces |
| | |
|
<
< | -Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon |
>
> |
|
| | |
|
<
< | The religion of fascism, which worships the State, is implemented through consolidation of the bureaucratic mechanisms. Administrative structures are streamlined, agencies are gagged, and internal dissent is quashed. Rulemaking is politicized, and specialization is replaced by stratification. Corporate, political, media, and governmental processes are combined, as the whole of industrial, military, and technocratic society is brought under a unified structure. At this stage,the regime's operational goal is apparent: concentrate power to the inner circle. |
>
> | The liberal economic establishment is shocked at the increasing polarization between the Left and Right. "The center must hold!" moans Tony Blair. "Extremists!" decries the New York Times. "The middle is vanishing!" whines the National Review. |
| | |
|
<
< | The awoken comprehend what is happening, but some time ago we lost the language to explain it. Once again the Right has mobilized the petit-bourgeoisie and the lumpenproletariat---the crazed masses whom finance capital itself has brought to desperation. The battlefield is therefore familiar, but its terrain is novel---organized by bitstreams, data packets, and network protocols. |
>
> | To socialists, the trend is unsurprising. Karl Marx prophesized that capitalism would eventually split the world into "two great hostile camps," a prediction taken by contemporary socialists to describe the disruptive effects of automation. As machinery replaces labor, the socialist opines, affected workers lose faith in liberalism. Increasingly, these workers embrace either socialism or fascism. |
| | |
|
<
< | The fundamental power dialectic, however, is unchanged: our adversaries control the money-capital, and we control the labor. Still, to win hearts and minds, we must adapt our lexicon to a digitized world. The truth is that while Marx put the pieces together, he confused the chronology. The Farce---the sort that produced Trump---is actually our current age, and the Tragedy---the sort that can produce an authentic socialist revolution---will come next. |
>
> | Yet this explanation is unsatisfactory for liberals, who are intuitively skeptical that political attitudes are socially conditioned. Sure, automation creates economic insecurity, but why does it necessarily follow that economic insecurity results in socialism or fascism? There was plenty of economic insecurity before capitalist automation, after all, and this kind of polarization was not happening then. |
| | |
|
<
< | Capitalism is the Disease |
>
> | A fair objection, but perhaps also reflective of the internal anxiety of the modern liberal. For, as much as we prefer treating dispossessed workers as refuse of the past, in a way they are a lens into our own future. Automation is taking over all parts of the economy. Already, it is affecting even lawyers, doctors, and bankers. If vulnerability to automation is compelling workers to discard liberalism, does that mean we will all do the same? |
| | |
|
<
< | The underlying contradiction of capitalism is as so: capitalists steal from the plates of workers, but workers require food to live as such. |
>
> | The answer, to be blunt, is "yes." As automation takes over, polarization will only increase and the liberal center-of-gravity will continue to crater. To understand why, we must link automation's economic consequences to its social implications. While automation creates economic strife, its more decisive impact is that it raises questions about how the machines should be governed. Liberalism, an ideology designed to govern an economy of humans, is ultimately incapable of answering these questions. The dispossessed thus turn toward socialism or fascism because, at some level, they recognize that those are the only viable options left. |
| | |
|
<
< | The individual capitalist---immersed in competition---constantly fights to keep wages down, prices high, and taxes low. Relentlessly he seeks out loopholes, discovers regulatory havens, and leverages enormous market power over the worker. Consequently, wealth concentrates to the propertied elite. |
| | |
|
<
< | Yet because the worker must participate in production, the system as a whole requires a baseline of aggregate demand. When the total cost of subsistence exceeds the summation of wages and state-backed social services, the system collapses. The crashes of 1929 and 2008 were caused by demand shortages, the first as a decline in discretionary spending and the second by debt that could not be validated by future income. Without conscious planning, such busts are inevitable. |
>
> | Automation as Dialectic: Who will push the button? |
| | |
|
<
< | To escape busts, capital must outsource, i.e. find workers to perform the same labor for lower wages. This task requires renovating the systems of information---the communication, transmission, and logistical processes that make globalization and the distribution of money-capital possible. The Fordist escape from the 1929 crash thus oversaw the mechanization of work and the automation of telecommunications---necessary steps for capital’s penetration into East Asian labor markets. Similarly the current recovery prioritizes software development and network expansion to enable outsourcing of the service sector. |
>
> | The terms "socialist'' and "fascist'' largely did not exist before capitalism. The ideologies are reactions to capitalism---specifically to capitalist automation. The 19th-century electrification of factories began the wide-scale mechanization of labor. Socialism arrived at around the same time as a methodology for society to consciously reinvest human activity back into the commonweal. Later, Henry Ford, who Adolph Hitler called his "inspiration," introduced sequential assembly techniques to optimize production of standardized outputs. Fascism emerged as the straightforward application of Fordism to the State: a procedure to dispose of unnecessary labor and reorganize society in the image of centralized management. |
| | |
|
<
< | The supersystem of capitalist accumulation is therefore trapped in a dangerous cycle. Booms are followed by busts, busts by renovation in information systems, renovation by outsourcing, and outsourcing by booms. In the process, insecurity and hardship become structural features of human life, and the reactionaries are given a space to operate. |
>
> | Software-based automation is the synthesis of these two developments: the electrification of assembly line management, the replacement of consciously planned labor with consciously planned machinery. When executing a decision no longer requires labor, all that remains is to determine who pushes the button. This is where socialism and fascism clash. Socialists want to democratize control of the button; fascists want to centralize it. |
| | |
|
<
< | Fascism is the Symptom |
| | |
|
<
< | As investors redirect capital from busted assets to new industry, they summon into being two new insurrectionary classes: the petit-bourgeoisie and the lumpenproletariat. The former emerges as investors divest themselves from antiquated industries, depriving entire portions of the bourgeoisie of access to credit. Unable to achieve sustainable growth, the petit-bourgeoisie lays off segments of the proletariat, creating the lumpenproletariat: a class trained in the labor of dying production systems but unprepared for the technology of the future. The 2008 Crash in particular resulted in severe, state-backed financial restructuring, accelerating the growth of dispossessed factions. |
>
> | Software and Governance: The Case Study of Autonomous Driving |
| | |
|
<
< | Unaware that capitalism is the true enemy, the dispossessed attempt to preserve the remnants of old society by turning against fellow workers. Capitalist systems of information reinforce this false consciousness: just as the right-wing propaganda of the 20th century divided workers of different colors and creeds, so too does neoliberalism imply a certain way of exploiting identity-based categories within the underclass. The deployment of personalized digital platforms, governed by powerful consumer analytics and backed by high-powered investors, actuates a politics of fear, division, and hatred---because such a politics happens to generate a profit. |
>
> | No development better embodies the contradictions created by the software-ization of the capitalist economy than the impending rise of self-driving vehicles. On the one hand, the automation of transport and distribution will produce enormous economic consequences. The professional driving industry is one of the most worker-intensive on the planet. Society will need to determine what to do with all that surplus labor. The necessary reconstitution will likely require another recession. |
| | |
|
<
< | Socialism is the Cure |
>
> | Liberals, to varying degrees, have always recognized this. John Maynard Keynes, the center-left liberal icon, would describe the problem as effective demand undercutting productive capacity. Autonomous driving will create mass unemployment, while also increasing supply far beyond that which can be validated by the resultant lag in consumer spending. Frederich Hayek, Keynes' center-right counterpart, would describe the issue as one of intertemporal coordination. The plunge in the price of transport will reconstitute the average consumer basket, and it takes time for investors to redirect credit toward these new preferences. Both theories are superficially accurate, but simply re-articulate the ``epidimec of over-production'' that Marx identified in 1848. The bottomline is that when machines replace humans, the economy must correct. Socialists advocate redistributing wealth to favor consumption and human capital. Fascists advocate expelling, militarizing, or purging from existence a subset of workers. In crisis, liberals simply implement watered-down variations of these two basic prescriptions. |
| | |
|
<
< | Ending the destructive cycle that begets reactionary tendencies requires permanently replacing the capitalist order with a regime of rationalized industry. A socialist society would prioritize the combination of learning and industry, and thereby expedite the integration of dispossessed classes with the proletariat through continuing education. It would construct a robust social safety net to care for the dispossessed between employment, while easing our transition to a fully automated society by gradually reducing working hours. And it would socialize finance, introducing the periodic liquidation of inept assets as an institutional feature of the economy. The Farce inherent in the emergent reactionary regime is precisely in that it will not install these solutions, but instead accelerate the material enrichment of the monied elite. |
>
> | Liberals, however, do not follow up their economic diagnoses with social analysis. Equally important to this discussion is the deep normative questions that arise from technological change. As analysts note, the software-ization of the steering wheel comes with profound ethical quandaries. Hit a person crossing the street or swerve into a crowd of onlookers? Run over a dog or brake and be hit by the vehicle behind? These are human questions that require a human system of governance. |
| | |
|
<
< | Thus while the terrain may have changed, the basic lesson has not: fascism is the creation of capitalism, and socialism is the solution to both. What distinguishes the present moment instead is that we exist at a unique stage in the development of the systems of information. The rise of the Internet has reduced the marginal cost of transporting money-capital to zero, and therefore gave the Right an upper hand. After all, when a resource can reach every corner of an economic system for free, it is logical that those who control said resource will exert enormous influence. The Internet thus reoriented the political landscape to empower the owners of capital. |
>
> | Who, under liberalism, governs the the realm of the machine? Who decides what rules automated drivers must follow? Corporate CEO's? The head-of-state? An independent commission? A consumer survey? Any way you slice it, the answer basically comes down to democracy or autocracy. Either the inner logic of production must open itself to the collective input of society, or all power concentrates to the privileged few. |
| | |
|
<
< | The next important development is near, however. Soon, autonomous vehicles will disrupt society, and the marginal cost of transporting labor and goods will also approach zero. On will come the Tragedy: mass unemployment, social upheaval, lost faith in government. As the crisis reaches its apex, the critical gap between learning and industry---now hidden---will be exposed, the student debt bubble will burst, and the future will be up for grabs: a veritable scramble for control of the means of production. |
| | |
|
<
< | Now is the time to organize. The critical moment is coming, and the Left best be ready when it arrives. |
>
> | A Concluding Thought (Experiment)
To the disinterested observer, these two effects of software-ization---its economic impact and normative implications---may seem disconnected. Perhaps it is useful to put ourselves in the shoes of the dispossessed worker. Soon, tens of millions of truck drivers will confront a reality in which their livelihoods are taken by a machine. Many will have spent years working hard, keeping their heads down, and contributing what they could. At this point, is it illogical to question why society has abandoned you, without a plan to get you back on your feet? Is it illogical to contemplate whether the lessons you were taught might be lies? Is it illogical to start listening to those who say that perhaps that machine is serving someone other than you?
Immanuel Kant, one of the great liberal thinkers, famously proclaimed that all knowledge begins with experience. Perhaps Blair and others would be less confused if they started taking that lesson to heart. |
| |
As a political opinion piece, there doesn't seem to me much new here. Anything that could be said to have to do with us in our learning process here comes in the last paragraph, where you are offering, apparently, an "end of work" claim about the effect of digital technology on the economic future. That's more last-semester than this one. But if you can expand on it---turning it from a mere proclamation that doesn't have any analytic value into an actual argument offering some information and extrapolating from it in at least a plausible fashion, perhaps even dealing with the evident counter-arguments---we will have taken the piece from marginal to valuable.
|
|
>
> |
I fully agree with your criticism of the structure/content of the first draft and have rewritten to hopefully address your concerns. However, I strongly disagree that this subject can be said to be either more or less appropriate for one semester or the other. First, the conceptual severance of economy from governance is not something I am particularly eager to entertain. Second, I think Orwell and Foucault proved pretty decisively that mass surveillance is the primary instrument through which fascism takes over liberal society from the inside, and I don't feel the need to prove it again in 1000 words. Thus, I did not find it useful for my purposes to write a piece on some variation of how (A) our society possesses the tools of surveillance (obvious), (B) fascists like to surveil (also obvious), (C) there is a risk fascists will actually use the tools of surveillance (obvious since last November), or (D) the bourgeoisie possesses a solution to (A),(B), or (C) (obviously not). I found it more personally fulfilling to prove that there are discernible, materialist reasons why these things are happening now and that, for these same reasons, it is possible to imagine a better world.
|
| |
| META TOPICMOVED | by="ShayBanerjee" date="1486770402" from="CompPrivConst.ShayBanerjeeFirstEssay" to="CompPrivConst.ShayBanerjeeFirstPaper" |
|---|
|