Fukuyama in the Factory: The End of Work and the End of History

Over at Jacobin, Peter Frase and Seth Ackerman have been debating anti-work politics and post-productivism. In "Stop Digging: The Case Against Jobs", Frase argues that the left ought to challenge the "historically perpetuated" view that treats "wage labor as though it is a unique source of dignity and worth." "As long as the left remains fixated on more wage labor as the solution to our problems," he writes, "we'll always be vulnerable to the argument that the socially beneficial changes we want will 'kill jobs.'" For Frase, "socialism should be about freeing people from wage labor, rather than imprisoning them in lives of useless toil." To do this, he calls on the left to agitate for more radical measures and "move away from tightly linking jobs and income." He proposes, as a kind of solution to massive unemployment, a guaranteed minimum income.

However, fellow Jacobin writer Seth Ackerman finds fault in Frase's reasoning. In "The Work of Anti-Work"Ackerman writes, "I'm left cold by the suggestion...that it would be better to transform the 12.5 million Americans forced out of work by the recession into a quasi-permanent class of idle citizens." The problem, according to Ackerman, is that this would create "classes of arbitrarily idled citizens, supported by their fellow citizens...it strikes me as presumptuous to assume that most unemployed would want this." "The more general - in fact, almost universal feeling," Ackerman states, "is that it's problematic when some are poor and others rich, or when some spend their lives working while others are at leisure." A guaranteed minimum income would, therefore, neither lead to full employment nor eliminate class resentment.

The End of Embodied Labor?
All this hypothesizing about the economic landscape of the future reminded me of Francis Fukuyama and "The End of History." In a NY Times article entitled "After Neoconservativsm," Fukuyama writes, "The End of History" "presented a kind of Marxist argument for the existence of a long-term process of social evolution, but one that terminates in liberal democracy rather than communism." "The Neoconservative position," he lamented, "was... Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will." Fukuyama's lament, I think, can also be applied the the views of Frase and Ackerman (minus the value judgement Fukuyama implies with "Leninist"). A legislative agenda aimed towards transcending productivism or a plan to create a guaranteed minimum income are attempts to deal with an unclear economic eventuality - a "post-productivst" future - that could very well be a historical inevitability. The left, then, should focus not on forestalling history, but on preparing for its end.

Both Frase and Ackerman ignore the fact that a "post-productivist" future looks increasingly possible, especially in light of austerity measures. However, this "post-productivist" future will not be the result of a more generous welfare state. Trends in financialization, workplace automation, population aging, and precariousness all pressage the end of embodied labor. Even now, in the short term, efficiency gains and technological improvements have rendered human labor increasingly superfluous. This means that for all the agitation about separating jobs from income, post-industrial societies may be left without the option to do so. Jobs may become scarce enough that income must be stripped from its association with employment.

It is an interesting thought experiment to view the current struggles against austerity measures as the first stages in "of a long-term process of social evolution" that terminates in a society without, or with significantly limited, human labor. Part of the pain of austerity measures, aside from the proletarianization of the salaried middle class, is the recognition that, to a greater extent than many would like to admit, humans are not needed for many productive tasks in the post-industrial economy. During the recession, when many firms fired workers to improve their bottom lines and combat the drop-off in consumer consumption, it became clear (in certain industries) that a reduction in the size of the workforce did not lead to a decrease in productivity. In the era of austerity, governments have come to the same realization.

The seeds of an economy run by robots and made by robots have already been planted. In the finance sector, algorithmic trading is in the process of eliminating the need for people on the stock market floor. In the manufacturing sector, human workers have long since been replaced by automated machines. Slowly but surely, man is creating technology that makes himself superfluous to the processes of production. And naturally, this dramatically changes the relations of production. If capital no longer needs labor, then what is labor to do?

May Day Reflections - One Week Later

Union Square was packed. Aging Maoists, reformist liberals, and the occasional steampunk-looking person stood shoulder to shoulder under a sun that had grown progressively warmer as the day wore on. Tom Morello's atrociously banal "Worldwide Rebel Song"" rang out from the speakers placed around the park. We had marched there from Bryant Park, starting on the sidewalk and then gradually taking the street. We had streamed down the avenue as police on their scooters tried desperately to corral us at each intersection. The air in the square was triumphant but apprehensive. It felt like we had finally done it. Thousands were assembled in Union Square. We had effectively shut down a major boulevard in the busiest city on Earth.

As Tom Morello's final chords echoed around one last time, I left the park to survey the surrounding streets. Were more people coming? Where were all the street cleaners, garbage men, and bus drivers who should have already joined us? A taxi whizzed past, probably carrying some wealthy European tourist. More cars drove by. People entered and exited luxury shops. Kids just out of school exercised their civic imperative to consume. Just two blocks away from Union Square, business carried on as if nothing was happening. Yet somehow, sympathetic writers (see the Nation's Allison Kilkenny's post-May Day article and Natasha Lennard's pre-May Day article) have been reluctant to recognize the May 1 General Strike for what it was - like many recent Occupy actions, a disappointment. 

Firstly, May Day was disappointing because it wasn't really a strike. Sure, lots of students, young members of the creative class, and veterans of the anti-war movement were there. But the unions didn't join the march until later in the afternoon. Transit workers, teacehers, sanitation workers all worked on the day of the General Strike. Indeed, the May 1 General Strike action would not have been possible had there been an actual strike. Many of the activists who arrived at Bryant Park via subways or buses would not have been able to do so had there been a strike. The students from New Jersey, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens would not have been able to make it either. The supreme irony of the May 1 General Strike is that no action would have been possible if the city's workers had actually refused to work.

The second disappointment has to do with tactics. And there's been a lot of writing about the NYPD presence and the brutal tactics it employed against protestors. The NYPD learned from last fall - it wanted nothing to do with the mass arrests that marked the early days of the Occupy movement. Instead of the spectacle of arrests, like the Brooklyn Bridge in October, the NYPD adopted a subtler and more brutal strategy. But what is disappointing is that the effectiveness of this strategy - "snatch and grab"- is not due to the sheer power in numbers of the police. Rather, the Occupy movement has made it easier, and this was the case on May Day, for police to apprehend activists and disrupt marches by using the "snatch and grab" strategy.

"Snatch and grab" as crowd control is successful chiefly because it disrupts the flow of a march. When thousands of pople are flowing down a street, the best way to effectively impede their motion is not some kind of colossal barricade but rather some kind of threatening distraction. When the police pull a young woman out of a crowd and throw her down on the pavement - as has happened countless times - the attention of the march is diverted. Movement halts and confusion takes over. What just happened? Who was that? And of course there is the concomitant attempt to make an un-arrest, which diverts the attention of the marchers even further. The answer to this police behavior is not to become callously indifferent to the abuse of our comrades; instead, we must find a way to make "snatch-and grab" ineffective, if not impossible. 

Police fire on protesters blocking an intersection

I am not a seasoned protester or professional activist by any means; I am a high school student from New Jersey. But I was there on May Day, and I witnessed the disappointment. I was weaned on the legend (and I say legend because I was five years old in 1999) of the protests at the WTO conference in  Seattle. It is almost impossible to compare Occupy to the global justice movement of the 90s and the coalition of groups that came together in Seattle in 1999. And even so, Seattle has already been dissected, analyzed, and fetishized. But there is one image from the grainy youtube clips of Seattle of which I am reminded nearly every time I think about Occupy: protesters blocking an intersection, forcing the police to open fire with rubber bullets and tear gas. The protests in Seattle prevented the conference from happening. It blocked the WTO delegates from entering the meetings. To do this, activists took over intersections, blockaded roads, and halted the flow of traffic. In most cases, these tactics have been absent from the Occupy protests. Though unpermitted marches have become a hallmark of sorts of the Occupy movement, they create only minor disruptions and occur almost randomly. There is no specified goal or target (and I'm not taking about demands here). The unpermitted marches simply end up leading several hundred people down New York City sidewalks.

The Occupy movement, at its core, is about putting an end to business as usual for Wall Street - putting an end to the unquestioned reign of the "1%" over the "99%." Occupy, then, is about disruptions - so is the General Strike. The purpose of both is to stop the flow of capital. But this is hard to do when marches simply rush through the streets or sidewalks. disrupting little and certainly not halting the flow of anything.

The unpermitted march inhabits a strange place on the spectrum of public protest. It is not a state-sanctioned event, so the police remain antagonists instead of facilitators - but it is not an act of civil disobedience. In most cases, walking with a group down a sidewalk is not illegal, but it is still moderately disruptive and it irritates police. Occupy has often been reluctant to use flat out civil disobedience - such as public sit downs and blockades of city streets- out of fear of directly violating the law and the sensibilities of mainstream Americans. Occupy's strategy, instead, has been to tread the line of legality in the hope that a violent police response will win the movement sympathizers. But this strategy has not worked. Those the movement hoped to win over simply react to the roving sidewalk protests as a nuisance. "Shut up and stop crowding the sidewalk" is a common response. If the public is not receptive to timid attempts to remain within the bounds of the law, then the law must be broken.

If we're going to get arrested anyway - snatched and grabbed off the street into a paddy-wagon - then let's get arrested the right way! What better method of clotting the arteries of capitalism is there than to sit our asses down in the middle of a Times Square intersection with 5,000 of our closest friends? The cops will need to do more than "snatch and grab" to get rid of us. And we can be sure the amount of time that would be enough to turn those clogged arteries into a stroke. But to successfully induce a cardiac arrest, we need more people in the street; as long as the number of protesters remain in the thousands, the media will continue to ignore them.