Saturday, September 11, 2004
(11:17 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Dick Cheney and the Jobless Economy
This represents both a follow-up to Richard's post on Dick Cheney's recent statements on the role of Ebay in the US economy and an attempt to live up to the claim to be a Hardto-Negrian blog. Even before my H-N days, I was a proponent of the theory of the coming "jobless economy" -- and although everyone I mentioned this idea to was skeptical at best, I believe that Cheney's statements can be taken as an indicator that my fundamental insight was correct. To wit:It's approaching Thanksgiving time, and all the elementary school kids are getting ready to study the Native Americans again. This year, however, I think that they should take it a little more seriously -- not out of an exaggerated respect for Native Americans themselves, but because the techniques they used to survive in our harsh North American climate may be of great practical use in the future. That's why I've checked out an illustrated children's book on Native American culture from the Bourbonnais Public Library and am committing it to memory. Let me explain my rationale:That analysis, though perspicacious, lacked two central insights: the rise of postmodern biopolitics and the informatization of production. In Multitude, Hardt and Negri explain at great length the ways in which traditional methods of survival, including traditional approaches to agriculture and medicine, anticipated the postmodern mode of production, requiring individual workers to draw on a broad variety of knowledges, as opposed to the narrow specialization of properly modern labor. Thus, in the same way that a Native American shaman had to combine various herbs into a medicinal poultice suitable to the individual case and the traditional farmer must simply "know" when to plant and harvest based on an intimate knowledge of the earth and the weather patterns, so also an Ebay trader must deploy a variety of knowledges in his attempt to generate profit from the sale of second-hand goods -- as must the successful online gambler, freelance massage therapist, prostitute, etc.
During this so-called "jobless recovery," companies are learning a valuable lesson: labor is expensive, and they should try to use as little of it as possible. Those companies that need labor and can't afford decadent Americans can look overseas; those who can't afford Chinese people can hire robots. Marx's infamous declining rate of profit will put us all out of work, and eventually it will even put the robots out of work. Until the robot wars begin, however, we unemployed humans are going to need some method of survival other than relying on the welfare state, which is not "sustainable."
That's where reviving a hunter-gatherer society comes in. Although the buffalo is extinct, it's well-known that there's a deer overpopulation problem. As of right now, most human use of deer consists of weekend amusement and car demolition, and a lot of perfectly good meat is going to waste, not to mention all the cool stuff we could make out of the skins and bones. If the government would just give a bow and arrow and a light jacket to every unemployed person in the union and turn them loose in Northern Michigan, a lot of our nation's problems would be solved.
Although many would certainly view the Bush administration's economic policies as spelling the eventual ruin of the American economy, statements like Cheney's help point toward ways in which what appears as a negative development actually opens up a space for emancipation. The very policies that appear to destroy the traditional job-based economy are simultaneously nurturing the informal economy, that is, the realm of affective labor and, in general, biopolitical production that is at once economic and social in character (see Empire, 292-293).
Such labor already models an immanent political alternative to hierarchy and sovereignty. Previous socialist revolutions failed to be genuinely liberatory because of their grounding in the modern regime of labor, which is always characterized by hierarchy and unidirectional exploitation. Labor in an online community such as Ebay or in affective work such as massage produces both economic value and, more importantly, a network of relationships that have the potential of eluding the purposes of Empire. By depriving Americans of participation in the traditional regime of the "job," the economic policies of the Bush administration are thus contributing to the creation of the coming subject of universal political emancipation, the multitude.
(Similar Hardto-Negrian analyses might be produced where the Bush debacle in Iraq undercuts notions of sovereignty or where the chaos in Afghanistan shows the inadequacy of traditional parliamentary structures to the full realization of the concept of democracy.)
