A few weeks ago Oxford Michigan, a small town adjacent to my community, was rocked by a school shooting. The incidence was the largest school shooting since 2018. The details of what happened can be poured over in a number of stories. Regardless of how the actual tragedy takes place what happens afterward is clockwork.
Pundits, politicians, and commentators of all stripes come out of their respective corners to duke it out over The Gun Question. It's hardly blameworthy to want to prevent mass shootings, especially those that occur in schools and victimize young people. However, the discussions regarding solutions are, like every conversation revolving around a deeply systemic issue, annoying as shit.
The conservative, pro-gun stance is obviously unserious about preventing future gun violence. The Wayne Thibbideau line of argumentation - that more guns would in theory prevent mass shootings - is a defacto pro-gun violence argument. Gun violence plaguing communities across the country would be acceptable as long as all the parties involved were armed.
But while the conservative mind lacks in solutions to random acts of gun violence their counterpoints to liberal stances on gun control can actually ring true. Namely, that gun criminalization will not prevent gun violence and there is no guarantee that proposed gun legislation would prevent any given incidence of violence.
This of course is the risk liberal politicians and pundits take when they stake the imperative to a given tragedy. Nothing embodies the politician's fallacy more than gun violence: "we have to do something about x, y is something, therefore y is doing something about x". This is to say nothing of the efficacy of the laws themselves. I support things like red flag laws or permit laws because they have been shown to reduce murders and suicides (which I generally think there should be less of), but neither of these laws would have prevented the Oxford shooting.
The rationalization is very similar to the body camera debate in my mind. I support making police officers wear body cameras, I support making them turn on those cameras when they interact with the public, I support making it a crime to cover up the camera in such interactions. This does not mean that body cameras are an effective measure of preventing police violence. Citing the need for more body cameras after a high-profile police brutality case is just as tone-deaf as citing the need for red flag laws after a high-profile school shooting.
The worse inclination is to criminalize guns, something Bloomberg's anti-gun legislation outfit is known for. Unlike permit laws, red flag laws, or laws that generally scale back the distribution of firearms this legislation aims at criminalizing gun ownership itself. This has a war on drugs effect where there is very little curbing violence or gun use, but there is intrusive police interaction that of course disproportionately falls on communities of color. I oppose banning lots of things for this exact reason, including abortion. The leftist podcast Citation Needed has an excellent episode on this phenomenon.
Ultimately if liberal politicians and pundits want to claim that they're interested in preventing the next Oxford (which was the next Marjory Stoneman Douglas, which was the next Marshall County, etc) they should focus on systemic measures. Things that vastly reduce the number of firearms produced and proliferated in this country. Whether you support such policies or not, you have to admit they'd at least mean we're taking the problem seriously.
In the wake of the 2016 election upset, everyone was clamoring for profiles of the White Working Class™, the demographic who apparently delivered Donald Trump the presidency over Hilary Clinton. The WWC is a distinct group of white, non-college degreed people. The US media machine got to work; NYT reporters hit diners across the region and books like Hillbilly Elegy were put on a pedestal. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/books/6-books-to-help-understand-trumps-win.html
Admittedly I fell into the interest trap, particularly when I listened to a Fresh Air interview about Everybody's Fool by Richard Russo. The novel revisits Richard's 1993 novel Nobody's Fool, itself a supposed profile of economically anxious, older, blue-collar white dudes left behind in an increasingly consolidated world with a globalized supply chain. The interview touched on the pertinence of such a novel in light of current events.
I picked up Nobody's Fool that year not wanting to start with the sequel, but it kept getting pushed down the list by more interesting books. Finally, a whopping five years later, I finished it. Except in all the time it took me to get to it the mythos surrounding the White Working Class sort of faded. The idea that this demographic delivered the upset Trump victory has been hotly contested, but more importantly, the saturated coverage of them proved something we probably all could have guessed: these people just aren't that interesting.
This is all to say that fictionalized depictions of the White Working Class have to rely on some pretty ingenuine trickery to make them a literarily appealing bunch. It's important to note that books like Hillbilly Elegy and Nobody's Fool are meant to be about the working class, not for them. These are novels for the professional class, for people clamoring to understand the demographic.
This guy is here to give us insight on the working class??
Nobody's Fool takes place in the town of Bath in upstate New York. One-time tourism hub, the town has slipped into irrelevancy with a couple of ill-placed highways and the drying up of their key tourist attractions (you guessed it, natural springs; "baths"). At the heart of the novel is decay; a decaying town full of old, decaying people with decaying values and decaying identities.
To Russo's credit, he is a good writer. His opening depiction and ongoing description of Bath function as a type of intimate, but modern world-building. This is a town I have certainly been to in Michigan, or Ohio, or *throws dart at map of the midwest*. The believability is key to the setting but also makes the novel all the more frustrating.
It's fine that Russo's explanation of why Bath is in the state it's in leaves much to the imagination. Given that the town itself is so present in our lived reality we don't actually need much explanation and Russo throws enough hints our way (giant store comes to town, tourism dies, mills get outsourced etc etc). I think I can even forgive letting local bankers and real estate developers - represented in Nobody's Fool by the graciously humanized characters Clive Jr. and Carl Roebuck - for a sort of hand waving point about the solidarity of locality or something.
No, what's most frustrating is that the town of Bath is decisively not caricatured, but the characters and their actions are. The novel's protagonist Sully can be described as, if nothing else, an academic's idea of what a working-class person is; wise-cracking rough exterior covering up a good heart. Someone who can't help but make bad decisions. This leaks out to the rest of the cast of characters; the town simpleton, the small diner owner, the retired schoolmarm, the shifty town doctor, the eccentric local lawyer, the list goes on and on. It's like that scene in Beauty and the Beast where Belle is singing around all the "simple and provincial" people busied in their chosen career.
In short, the town of Bath certainly exists, but these people do not. While they have endearing qualities and Russo has flashes of fun characterization, when these characters fall into their mold it's almost unbearable. While a lot of critics describe the novel as funny or witty I found myself cringing when Sully was cracking wise with the other locals in the town. I just imagine my carpenter father or my truck-driving grandfather reading these exchanges.
The worst faux pas though has to be what I can only believe is Russo's stab at the psychological profile of the White Working Class; this idea that their unfortunate condition is largely a result of their actions. Hillbilly Elegy makes this same case, as do many attempts at capturing the aesthetic. This demographic acts against their best interest and it's due to some deep psychological inability to do so because of culture or masculinity or a troubled past or some mystic pass-down from one's father or some combination of all of these things.
If profiles of the White Working Class are old, then the idea that people's miserable material condition is the result of poor personal decisions is ancient. Russo's exploration of this idea is no more or less boring than anyone else's, and it's just as wrong. If you took Sully and put him in a country with universal healthcare, housing, and actually good disability insurance he could make all of the terrible decisions present in the book and his material condition wouldn't be worse for it. But there is zero interrogation of power in Nobody's Fool, only foolish individual decisions.
There are some genuinely fun and funny parts to Nobody's Fool, some of the characters are moving and the town's decay as an ongoing plot point is also engaging. But the idea that any book, fiction or otherwise, or any profile or media exculpation can shed any light on why workers aren't stuffy liberals like the rest of us is a trap. Don't fall into it.
The belief that systemic racism is non-existent in contemporary America hinges on the fact that there are no longer any official laws on the books with punitive outcomes based on skin color, race isn't even mentioned. But looking at the specific moment in history when our laws became "color-blind" reveals how systemic racism can remain intentional policy without having to formally acknowledge race at all.
That inequality between black and white American's exist is an immutable fact. No pundit, no matter the ideological stripe, can deny this. The view on the left that I've always thought most convincing is that systemic racism - racism embedded into various systems and institutions rather than the racism of personal interaction - is largely the cause of these inequalities.
Systemic racism can be seen in current systems; black Americans are disproportionately targeted in traffic stops which is a variable in why they are disproportionately incarcerated, which is a variable of racial inequality. It can also be seen in systems in the past; the federal government's policy of redlining being used to deny black Americans access to quality housing in the suburbs being coupled with discrimination in education and the employment sector causing the wealth and opportunities garnered from homeownership to be severely stunted or non-existent, which is also a variable for current inequalities.
The arguments against the view that systemic racism can be used to explain racial inequalities most often emanate from the right (but not always) and usually take two forms with one core premise. The first form is that systemic racism does not currently exist because there are no laws on the books that specifically delineate skin color. The second is that, while systemic racism was existent in the past (only real sickos deny the existence of Jim Crow) it has little to no bearing on current inequalities because....there are no laws on the books that delineate skin color anymore.
To demonstrate we're going to use prominent right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro taking on a video about systemic racism from ActTV. Shapiro is one of only a few commentators I've ever seen attempting to take on redlining and systemic racism in such an accessible way. As we'll see, his argument against the impacts of historic redlining and higher-ed admission discrimination hinges largely on the fact that those two policies are now illegal (3:34):
The move conservatives like to pull from here is to suggest that any current examples of racism are actually other factors not having to do with race at all. Here Shapiro rejects the possibility of modern redlining because the example of redlining cited in the video wasn't using race as a factor, it was using "liabilities, employment history, credit history, and other variables" (7:50):
Even the suggestion that systemic racism from times past might play a factor in current inequalities is rejected by Shapiro because he posits it's impossible to know how much this could be true given that our modern policies on lending and school funding are race-blind; they don't mention race (14:17):
This Race Blind Theory becomes the favored rhetorical move of the racism-skeptical because it evokes a simple truth to reject two powerful arguments. You saw Shapiro use this with housing in the above clips, but if you watch the whole video, he will use this same move for mass incarceration, school funding, and unemployment. There are, objectively, no laws, rules, or policies that specifically mention race, once this premise is accepted you have no choice but to acknowledge that inequalities stemming from these systems are from "other variables", as Shapiro does.
Fortunately, we don't have to accept the premise of Race Blind Theory. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is a professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for History. She is also the best living writer who tackles Race Blind Theory. Her book From Black Lives Matter to Black Liberationwas a look at why mass incarceration and the legal system treats black Americans unfairly despite our criminal laws having no mention of race. Taylor's most recent undertaking is Race for Profit, where she takes a specific look at the moment in history the racist federal policy of redlining was made illegal. Not only does KYT demonstrate that once redlining was made illegal the ramifications didn't magically go away as Shapiro asserts, but she also shows that the ramifications were used to perpetuate systemic racism under cover of being race-blind.
The thrust of KYT's argument in Race for Profit is that once racial segregation was created and brutally enforced through a combination of state policy and violence from the white community at large, simply making the policy go away wasn't going to get rid of the segregation. In fact, as KYT goes on to show, there were many private actors in real estate and finance that profited from the existence of segregation. As she notes in the introduction:
"Racial real estate practices, then, represented the political economy generated out of residential segregation. The real estate industry wielded the magical ability to transform race into profit within the racially bifurcated housing market. The sustenance and spatial integrity of residential segregation, along with its apparent imperviousness to civil right rules and regulations, stemmed from its profitability in white as well as African American communities - even as dramatically different outcomes were produced. In the strange mathematics of racial real estate, Black people paid more for the inferior condition of their housing. They referred to this costly differential as a 'race tax'. Real estate operatives confined each group to its own section of a single housing market to preseve the allure of exclusivity for whites, while satisfying the demand of housing for African Americans. This was evidence not of a dual housing market but of a single American housing market that tied race to risk, linking both to the rise and fall of property vlues and generating proits that grew into the sinew binding it all together"
In other words, redlining continued after it was made formally illegal, but it was under the guise of being "race-blind" and even more dastardly, in the name of housing equality and free markets.
The preservation of segregated housing was still deeply intentional and it was actually the decision to make the language of housing policy at the time race-neutral that demonstrates why. The new, purportedly fair, housing policy was not about "redress, restitution, or repair", if it had been it would have specifically tried to address the harm that redlining caused, the effects it still had. "Instead, by ignoring race, new practices that were intended to facilitate inclusion reinforced existing patterns of inequality and discrimination". KYT points out that African American neighborhoods were given a racially neutral descriptor like "subprime", which served the purpose of making them uniquely distinguishable from white neighborhoods (keep Shapiro's "other variables" comment in mind here) without any mention of race. Of course these neighborhoods weren't prime, they had been segregated and brutalized for decades, but a race-blind law won't recognize this because doing so would have to acknowledge race as a determinant in the value of these homes.
This can be seen in a variety of housing programs and policies at the time. When the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was removing racist language from underwriting manuals and orders of operations and promising to expand homeownership to African Americans, it was, at the same time, crafting a new language to institute a "Separate but Equal" policy in housing lending. Even where middle-income black families did receive loans for housing in the suburbs after the legal abolition of redlining, Race for Profit is full of stories about the violence these families faced from white communities. Fire bombings, rioting, pipe bombs, and segregation policy passed at the municipal level in the name of protecting property values (such policy was held to be lawful in courts around the country exactly because they never mentioned race, only determinants like income or homeownership longevity or credit scores that had an effect on perceived value). Even though race was absent from the letter of the law, much of white America still practiced segregation by any means necessary well after 1968. It's ludicrous to pretend this wouldn't have ramifications only 50 years later.
It's also true that just because something is illegal it doesn't still happen. Laws banning discrimination, like laws banning anything, are only so good as the body of government tasked with enforcing them. KYT points to the number of mortgage lending organizations that "simply ignor[ed] federal rules against housing discrimination". And the ones that adhered to the anti-discrimination rules could get around them by using, as Ben Shapiro would call them, "other variables"; "the lenders could limit loans based on their location and the requirements that the homes or buildings to be purchased had to remain in the 'city core'". This meant that all of the loans these organizations had to cut to black Americans could easily be given exclusively for housing in predominately black areas without ever having to evoke the racial identity of their borrowers or the locations they were marketing them to.
Conservatives like Shapiro, after claiming wildly that the illegality of systemic racism effectively ends it, will then move to say that racial disparity exists because of personal choices. As KYT puts it, it is a belief that "the systems and institutions of the country [are] strong enough to bestow the political, economic, and social riches of American society onto all who [are] willing to work hard and commit themselves to a better future". While the systems and institutions offer a colorblind market where economic fitness reigns the ultimate indicator for access to those choices, the problem is that systemic racism has already impacted that economic fitness, and so what is then created is a cycle of racism without the acknowledgment of race.
And the cycle continues with real ramifications. If systemic racism continued after it was made illegal, when did it stop? The answer is never. To quote KYT at length:
"The quality of life in US society depends on the personal accumulation of wealth, and homeownership is the single largest investment that most families make to accrue this wealth. But when the housing market is fully formbed by racial discrimination, there is deep, abiding inequality. There has not been an instance in the last 100 years when the housing market has operated fairly, without racial discrimination. From racial zoning to restricted convants to LICS to FHA-backed morgages to the subprime mortage loan, the US housing industry has sought to extort and financially benefit from the public perceptions of racial difference. This has meant that even when no discernable discrimination is detected, the fact that black communities and neighborhoods are perceived as inferior means that African Americans must rely on inherently devalued 'asset' for maintenance of their quality of life. This has created a permanent disadvantage. And when homeownership is promoted as a key to economic freedom and advancement, this economic inequality is reinforced, legitimized and ultimately accepted"
A collaboration between Reveal and the Center for Investigative Reporting showed that there were was still, in 2018, discrimination in lending happening in Michigan among other areas. Even now that lending eligibility is largely determined by algorithms, mathematical equations with no perceived threat of implicit human biases, the host of "other variables" that have been cultivated by years of legal and compounding, below-board discrimination are still impacting disparity in homeownership and wealth between black and white Americans. This is the definition of systemic racism.
"Defund the Police" isn't even the radical position that policing in America deserves.
With the exception of some absolute, anomalous sickos anyone who watched the brutal murder of George Floyd as he was crushed to death under the knee of a Minneaspolis officer ultimately agrees that "something must be done" about policing in this country. Yet the torrent of solutions that come from America's political commentator class span the entire range of inadequacy, from the Right's "simply punish the bad apples" to the Left's clamoring for reforms we've already watched fail.
Activists who took to the street, on the other hand, were bannering slogans like "Defund the Police" and "Abolish the Police". Protests over police brutality are as old as the existence of police, every time they are answered with reforms and every time instances of brutality occur regardless. Activists know there is no reforming brutal institutions.
Let the hand-wringing commence.
America, at its core, is a nation obsessed with marketing. Politicians have long been packaged and sold to the masses by the same consultants who package and sell household brands. It's a concept so internalized that every slogan has to work its way through what I imagine to be a giant Clap-o-Meter to measure its potential popularity among people. Having organized for Medicare for All I've seen this concept play out relentlessly. It's a single-payer healthcare system we call Medicare because of the relative popularity of the program, but it's not really Medicare, because it does a lot of things that Medicare doesn't do. It's maddening that we feel the need to do this.
So let's not. Defund the Police might be unpopular or scary or, god forbid, undertheorized. That should not stop us from vehemently arguing for what is right. After all, things like integrated schools and the end of Jim Crow weren't popular ideas at the time, enfranchisement for women or African Americans might have failed a popular vote when they were first proposed. Our goal now is to argue for Defund because it is right, not because it is some winning political strategy.
To contend with the most persuasive work of police abolitionists means Alex Vitale's the End of Policing is the place to start. Vitale is a sociology professor who is one of the prolific voices calling for an end to policing in the mainstream media.
Vitale writes very persuasively in the End of Policing. He wastes no time, there isn't even an introduction, he instantly launches into the two most pervasive myths of law enforcement: that reforms work and that the police are here to protect you.
Reforms Don't Work:
As Vitale says "any effort to make policing more just must address the problems of excessive force, over-policing, and disrespect for the public", he is absolutely ruthless on any reform that doesn't address any of these fundamentals. After all, historically speaking calls for body cams or sensitivity training have not served to curb the problems they claim to address. The failure of reforms is rooted in the fact that they don't root out the problems with police at the functional level and they do nothing to change the laws police are tasked with enforcing.
For example, calling for more diversity in police forces is a popular reform found in the liberal discourse. This seems intuitive, but study after study shows diversity has little to no effect on the use of excessive force. Vitale explains that "departmental priorities are set by local political leaders, who have driven the adoption of a wide variety of intensive, invasive, and aggressive crime-control policies that by their nature disproportionately target communities of color". It is the system that must be changed. Reforms that radically change the nature of the police, such as disarmament, are the only things worth pursuing.
Police are here to Police, not Protect:
Despite what you see on TV police are not some force for good preventing you and your whole family from being brutalized. In fact, if you live in poor and/or marginalized communities they are far more likely to be the force brutalizing you than protecting you. Vitale spends a good amount of time on the history of police and how, since inception, the design has been for a tool of control rather than defense. This is a useful exercise, but it's easier to look at policing today to see this phenomenon play out.
We can simply look at the sets of rules that police are tasked with enforceing and we can see that they are designed to give officers a reason to interact with certain populations rather than actually protect anyone. In fact "there is extensive research to show that what counts as crime and what gets targeted for control is shaped by concerns about race and class inequality and the potential for social and political upheaval". Consider the vast majority of the laws citizens are subject to and deeply consider whether they are designed to protect those same citizens or strategically criminalize behavior.
This is the model Vitale moves with in the End of Policing and why it makes such a compelling case with little to no complication. He dives into law enforcement as it exists in various sectors like immigration or education, as well as where it exists in our imaginations, like the belief that we're protected from things like gangs and terrorists.
Each area has its own chapter dedicated to it where Vitale examines decades of failed reforms and asks the reader to consider whether the existence of police have served to protect communities or if they have truly done more harm than good. The existence of police in education and immigration have only served to police the inequalities and austerity inflicted onto select populations. Police crack downs have done nothing to end gangs or terrorists, in fact aggressive state intervention by the police have only compounded the existence of these dangers.
No one is saying if you eliminated or defunded the police, all problems would be solved overnight. Nor is anyone saying that we should defund or abolish police overnight. What people like Vitale and the community activists and organizers championing this cause are asking for is a radical reimagining of law enforcement in this country. To argue against this notion is to argue for the continued existence of brutality, mass incarceration, state enforced racism. On this front we must be uncompromising.
TL;DR: Long Live the Post Horn! is just like Albert Camus' the Stranger, except instead of doing a racism and being condemned to death in order to discover the interconnectedness of all things and the value of life, the protagonist simply receives a letter.
Though it may not seem like it, Long Live the Post Horn! by Vigdis Hjorth is actually a call to arms. Set in Norway, the novel follows a deadened PR exec named Ellinor. Hjorth seems to dwell in that wonderful Scandanavian tradition of being able to write absolutely depressingly dry internal monologues, and the skill lends itself well to imparting just how bleak Ellinor's life is.
The interesting thing about Norweigan bleakness is that Ellinor's life is not materially downtrodden in any way. While poverty is certainly in the wings, Ellinor has brushes with homeless refugees, for example, the bleakness is more of a spiritual nature. We first meet Ellinor as she stumbles across an old diary she used to keep. Disgusted at what she's read, we are quickly embraced by the idea that Ellinor lives a passive life, one devoid of any meaning. Spending her time working and drifting through everything else. This becomes increasingly evident as we watch Ellinor joylessly interact with her family, lover, and co-workers as well as the world around her. She can barely write, she lacks focus.
Meanwhile, Ellinor's PR firm has been tasked by the postal workers union to try and defeat a bit of famous EU bureaucracy; something known as the Postal Directive. While the directive is a looming threat, all we really know is that it's an effort to force the post office to complete, cost cut, privatize etc. After the mysterious disappearance of her co-worker Dag, who was previously tasked with the work, Ellinor is forced to take the project on herself.
What follows is a journey not just of self-discovery but the value of universality. Hjorth writes movingly about the post office; how its commitment to deliver an essential service to all regardless of any is an affirmation of human dignity. A socialist spin on the existentialist call to live an awakened, active life. Ellinor plunges into a bitter struggle with the forces of Neo-Liberalism because what is more existentially liberating than fighting for the *literal* interconnectedness of all.
The trope that automation is coming for your job is a discourse trend as old as Aristotle. The discussion generally asserts automation and technology are developing at such a rapid rate that eventually all employment sectors will cease using human labor or else disappear entirely. Today the banner is carried by self-identified Futurists, Automation Theorists, and Tech Entrepreneurs all of whom I prefer to refer to as Tech Bros. Not just because the overwhelming majority of them are men but also because they seem to peddle in the Stoner-Older-Brother branch of philosophy.
The recognizable cast ranges from people I find infuriating like Elon Musk or Bill Gates to people I have a lot of respect for like Robert Reich or Andrew Yang. Of course, these are just the big names, there is a whole host of academic writers and other bros who argue that jobs like truck driver, grocery store clerk, manufacturing laborer, etc are going to rapidly disappear, and indeed already have due to technological innovations.
That's all in one corner, in the other corner is Aaron Benanav; New Left Review contributor and researcher at Humboldt University of Berlin. In Automation and the Future of Work, Benanav sets out to dispel the biggest myths in the automation discourse. While he certainly appreciates the spirit and value of the post-scarcity world that the Tech Bros articulate, his skepticism is reserved for the main thrust of the proposed narrative. Automation theorists have gotten wrong what's happened, what's going to happen, and what we should do about it.
What Happened? This challenge takes up the lion's share of the argument. For one, it's really the crux of the whole premise; if automation theorists are wrong about what happened thus far, their predictions for what's to come, being based largely on that narrative, are also less likely. It's also a pervasive and widely held belief, espoused by high profile people like Barack Obama, that automation has decimated our employment sector and many jobs with it.
Not only is this largely untrue, it doesn't even make the argument the Tech Bro's often think it does. Benanave takes on two favored examples; the disappearance of jobs and the deindustrialization phenomenon.
The history of unemployment suggests it's caused by shitty economies
To the extent that jobs have disappeared, human labor has not. Some ancillary and illustrative examples are in fields like sewing or construction. Robots have yet to be able to mass-produce tiny assembled components or sew garments, these jobs weren't automated out of existence in the US they were traded away, offshored, they're still done by humans at a massive scale. Construction fields still use tons of humans, while automated tools help make the jobs easier, they don't eliminate the work any more than getting a vacuum or a dishwasher means you don't have to do any labor associated with those tasks. While some skilled jobs no longer exist, a larger number of unskilled, lower-paying jobs have emerged. Using the elimination of certain jobs simply does not prove that the need for human labor is decreasing.
The trickier argument to be made is in manufacturing. Living in Metro-Detroit, it's easy to juxtapose images of hundreds of people on an assembly line piecing a car together in the past with the modern spider-like automation lines that assemble car frames with minimal human input. And to be clear, many people's jobs have been replaced with robots in this way, but the question still remains; is the reduced demand for human labor in manufacturing for that reason entirely? The fact is there are many jobs done by humans in manufacturing facilities (some are even complaining about skilled labor shortages). The real problem as Benanav's data shows is that plants don't need to hire as many people because fewer people are buying the shit we produce. Lower productivity levels mean fewer people hired, this can happen even when there is a high demand for human labor. This is called the productivity paradox, a phenomenon that would not exist if automation had obliterated a genuine need for people.
Put another way, technology has allowed us to deindustrialize while still producing a large quantity of goods, but without the accelerated demand for these goods, there is no need to hire more people or even, as GM recently showed, keep plants open. This drove many workers into the land of underemployment in the service sector, where the demand for human labor is still high.
So while technology has killed some jobs, we are still facing a massive demand for human labor as evidenced by our abundance of labor shortages; teacher shortages, truck driver shortages, engineering shortages, medical and home care worker shortages. Automation hasn't killed even a fraction of the jobs that our poor economy has and it hasn't met the demand for human labor in key employment sectors. What are the Tech Bros talking about?
What's Going to Happen? So far it seems that automation has just worsened a job distribution problem. It's killed certain jobs, but not the demand for human labor. Just because the Tech Bros were wrong about what has happened so far, doesn't mean they're wrong about what will happen. No, automated checkout stations have far from decimated the service sector, barely autonomous vehicles haven't driven armies of drivers out of their field (quite the opposite), but will rapidly emerging technologies? Benanav joins a number of commenters noting we're more likely headed to a "good jobless future" rather than a "jobless one".
Benanav draws attention to studies like those from the Oxford Martin School or the OECD that predict anywhere from 32 - 47% of jobs are "at high risk of automation". Lots of these studies are cited by the Tech Bros who hold them aloft like "the End is Nigh" signs. A lot of implications are developed from "graphs of exponentially rising computing capacities - with Moore's law of rising processor speeds standing in for technical change in general".
Benanav's central beef with what the future holds is one of the more convincing arguments in the book and is worth quoting at length:
"In reality, technological development is highly resource intensive, forcing researchers to pursue certain paths of inquiry at the expense of others. In our society, firms must focus on developing technologies that lead to profitable outcomes. Turning profits off of digital services which are mostly offered to end users for free online, has proven elusive. Rather than focus on generating advances in artificial general intelligence, engineers at Facebook spend their time studying slot machines to figure out how to get people addicted to their website, so that they keep coming back to check for notifications, post content, and view advertisements. The result is that, like all modern technologies, these digital offerings are far from socially neutral. The internet, as developed by the US government and shaped by capitalist enterprises, is not the only internet that could exist. The same can be said of robotics: in choosing among possible pathways of technological progress, capital's command over the work process remains paramount. Technologies that would empower line workers are not pursued, whereas technologies allowing for detailed surveillance of those same workers are fast becoming hot commodities. These features of technological change in capitalist societies have important implications for anyone seeking to turn existing technical means toward new, emancipatory aims. Profit-driven technological advances are highly unlikely to overcome human drudgery as such, at least on their own, especially where labor remains cheap, plentiful, and easily exploited" (from page 41).
What To Do? One thing Automation Theorists get right is that losing a job in a country like the US (interestingly enough Benanav points out in European and Asian countries automation is seen as a job creator) does a substantial amount of harm. While job loss isn't an indicator of massive automation takeover of employment sectors, it does hurt those most affected. The problem is that because the Tech Bros got the rest of their narratives wrong, their solutions aren't aimed in the right place.
Benanav focuses on two Tech Bro solutions; the UBI and Keynesian stimulus. I'm going to focus on UBI specifically because I've never seen anyone of any profile suggest that a Keynesian stimulus is a solution to automation in the job sector and the inclusion of this solution is weird because it would assume those making it agree that it's an economic slowdown and not automation killing the jobs in the first place.
To be clear, supporting a UBI is nothing to be too critical of, but Benanav even supports it as part of a broader solution to capitalism, just not as a solution to automation. The issue with the Tech Bro notion of a UBI is that it tries to answer the question; what to do with the unemployed. This seems like the right question to ask, except if masses of people aren't already permanently unemployed and they're not going to be, UBI will only address the issues of unemployed people. The rest of those who moved from the industrial sector to the service industry, or the mass of employees across the globe who are still engaged in human labor, will not stand to benefit as much if at all.
This is mainly because the Tech Bro UBI, although it's worthy of support as a distributive policy, still leaves systems of exploitation of human labor in place. It does this precisely becauseTech Bros don't believe that human labor will even exist. Except it will, all over the world. Benanav's solution to the death of individual jobs is a more robust welfare state (it might even feature a UBI) for the unemployed, but also expanded worker representation, protections, and share of profits for workers who will still be doing human labor across the globe.
I am once again plagued by books with
important stories to tell. Late-stage capitalism has let loose a torrent of
books by journalists and political commentators that focus on storytelling as
an answer to suffering. The books center the authors as observers in individual
people's tragic stories while contextualizing them with statistics and studies
of the broader crises. Don't call it Gonzo Journalism, these authors aren't
the main character even if they represent a real presence. They're more like
hyper-knowledgeable observers, they're storytellers, disciples, Uatu; this is
Gonzeaux Journalism.
I've read a number of these. Evicted by MatthewDesmondis about individuals caught up in the housing crisis, Our Kids* andTheShort and Tragic Life of Robert Peace are about inequality. Others, I have only
heard about; The Working Poor: Invisible in America, Nickel and Dimed, Waiting
for Superman, Fast Food Nation etc etc. In all of these (and more) the author
inserts themselves as the arbiter of the tragic types of stories capitalism
breeds, but their role sort of stops there. It's as though simply communicating
the real trauma of the lives of their subjects will be enough to rally their readers
to end the plight (although in each the call to action doesn't seem to extend
beyond "think about it!").
I can now add Sarah Kessler's Gigged to the
growing list. Along with Evicted, it's probably the best demonstration of why
I'm so frustrated with this genre of book. The individual stories of those
affected by capitalism are incredibly important and powerful, but if there is
no radical vision or assessment for the improved condition of the subject (to
say nothing of a call-to-action), what importance and power is there becomes
greatly diminished.
Rather than discuss each of the subjects in
Kessler's work, it's important to assess what end she is using them for. For
example, Curtis is a technically gifted, socially aloof programmer who couldn't
stand the mundanity of his 9-5 tech job; so, he quits and joins an army of gig
workers doing programming work on his own time. Kessler presents Curtis' story
as an ideal; this is the future of work the gig economy promised. His addition
is no doubt to add a level of complication to the narrative, as though to say
"we can't get rid of the gig economy! Look how it works for people like
Curtis!".
This sort of thing drives me fucking nuts and it
is a prevalent theme in Gigged. The one gig economy exec story is that of Dan
Teran, CEO and founder of Managed by Q. MbQ is a cleaning company attempting to
bring the Uber-style, app-based contingent workforce management to office
cleaning. When the idea falls apart because the company didn't have the
management skills to match the enormous amount of startup capital it received
(another issue in the gig economy world that I feel like Kessler barely
addresses), Teran and co take a different tract. They decide to be a "good
employer", a company that attracts top tier cleaning talent by offering
higher wages and other benefits. Go figure, the age-old "pay people
more" strategy pays off. The inclusion of MbQ seems to suggest that in
order to fix the issues in Gigged is if a number of companies decide to
become "good".
The problem in all of this is that there is
actually a lot of room in capitalist eco-systems for "good employers"
and exploitation to co-exist symbiotically. The only time I was exposed to the
concept was in Nicole Ashoff's book The New Prophets of Capital. The idea is
that, not only do "good" capitalists and employers lay cover fire for
bad ones - where they represent the golden child we can consistently point to -
they actually rely on systems of exploitation inherent to capitalism.
One of these is the concept of monopsony. An easy way to think of this is to think about a
bunch of small or midsize coffee shops that pay their baristas a bad wage. Then
you have a much larger coffee chain open up that pays slightly higher, even
gives benefits. What that large coffee shop is doing is controlling the labor
market by becoming monopsonistic. You're not going to quit and go work at the shittier coffee shops,
you're going to have a hard time unionizing or demanding more workplace freedom
etc. We don't have to think that hard this is what Starbucks and a whole host
of other sector companies do. Not every employer could be a "good"
employer or the system would empower workers who could simply go to a
competitor if they didn't like their working conditions or couldn't organize
etc.
So what Kessler is doing, whether intentional or
not, is presenting people like Curtis as an obstacle in preventing the sorts of
exploitation that happens to other people she profiles, like Kristy who worked
for the online, Amazon funded Mechanical Turk or Terrance who got caught up in
the pyramid scheme reeking Samaschool. She'll write scathingly of some of Uber's
lobbying efforts but then neglect to make the connection that some of these gig
companies that "work", companies like Managed by Q, exist exactly
because they can ride the coat tales of those exact lobbying efforts. What is
emphatically missing from the whole of Gigged is a radical reassessment of the
entire system.
The conclusion of Gigged is also outright
dastardly. Because Kessler has believed she's simply peeled back the curtain on
a complicated phenomenon, she too believes that the solution is some
complicated mixture we haven't quite found the recipe for at the center of everything. To do so, she reimagines
the tumultuous history of the industrial revolution as a sort of parallel for
today:
"It took another half century or so for the labor movement**, in partnership with government and private industry, to form things like a standard ten-hour day, state laws regulating child labor, and requirements for worker safety".
This view suggests the exploitation of the time
were almost accidental; just an inevitable hiccup when developing complex
manufacturing systems rather than inherent and intentionally developed features
of the systems themselves. This also suggests these problems were overcome
through out of the box, administrative problem solving as opposed to the
violent struggle the government, labor, and private industry engaged in. Here
is historian Howard Zinn talking about one such....uh...partnership... in
Ludlow:
"This was the Colorado coal strike that began in
September 1913 and culminated in the “Ludlow Massacre” of April 1914. Eleven
thousand miners in southern Colorado … worked for the Colorado Fuel & Iron
Corporation, which was owned by the Rockefeller family. Aroused by the murder
of one of their organizers, they went on strike against low pay, dangerous conditions,
and feudal domination of their lives in towns completely controlled by the
mining companies. …
When the strike began, the miners were
immediately evicted from their shacks in the mining towns. Aided by the United
Mine Workers Union, they set up tents in the nearby hills and carried on the
strike, the picketing, from these tent colonies.
The gunmen hired by the Rockefeller
interests—the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency—using Gatling guns and rifles,
raided the tent colonies. The death list of miners grew, but they hung on,
drove back an armored train in a gun battle, fought to keep out strikebreakers.
With the miners resisting, refusing to give in, the mines not able to operate,
the Colorado governor (referred to by a Rockefeller mine manager as ‘our little
cowboy governor’) called out the National Guard, with the Rockefellers
supplying the Guard’s wages.
The miners at first thought the Guard was sent
to protect them, and greeted its arrival with flags and cheers. They soon found
out the Guard was there to destroy the strike. The Guard brought strikebreakers
in under cover of night, not telling them there was a strike. Guardsmen beat
miners, arrested them by the hundreds, rode down with their horses parades of
women in the streets of Trinidad, the central town in the area. And still the
miners refused to give in. When they lasted through the cold winter of
1913-1914, it became clear that extraordinary measures would be needed to break
the strike."
Storytelling is important, but if we're going
to use it to make a broader point about the unacceptability of things like
entrenched poverty or rampant inequality, we need to be as Michael Brooks once
said; "kind to people and ruthless to systems". A great example
of storytelling paired with a radical vision is Tim Faust's Health Justice Now.
Faust uses first-hand stories about people caught up in the egregious American
healthcare system. Many of these stories are heartbreaking, but Faust uses them
to portray the unacceptability of the world we live in. He then brilliantly
articulates a world in which we remove the profit motive driving a lot of
the issues explored in the book. Faust discusses single-payer healthcare and an eventual move to not-for-profit pharma companies and he has a clear call to
action on how to get there; activism, class struggle etc.
Gigged does have an important story to tell.
Kessler has been writing about this for a long time and the ascendancy of the
gig economy will have ramifications for a long time. It's an important read,
but it's equally important to be critical of anything that seems so comfortable
with preserving the status quo.
