Eat the Rich.

It's an excerpt from A People’s Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics (Haymarket Books, August 2020), which I'll be purchasing.

Concurrently, I'm trying to make a decision about Thomas Piketty's most recent book, Capital and Ideology. Do I try to read it before the election, or after? It might not seem to matter, but somehow does.

Capital and Ideology is an astonishing experiment in social science, one that defies easy comparison. In its ambition, obsessive testimony and sheer oddness, it is closer to the spirit of Karl Ove Knausgård than of Karl Marx. It alternates between sweeping generalities about the nature of justice and the kind of wonkery that one might expect from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, often in the same paragraph. It is occasionally naive (it will bug the hell out of historians and anthropologists) but in a provocative fashion, as if to say: if inequality isn’t justified, why not change it?

Now, to Thier.

Under Capitalism, There’s No Such Thing as a “Fair Day’s Wage for a Fair Day’s Work”, by Hadas Thier (Jacobin)

We’ve got some bad news for you on Labor Day: your boss is exploiting you. Karl Marx explains how.

... Inequality has long been built into the core fabric of the American business model. Pitting black workers against white workers against immigrant workers has been a particularly potent, tried-and-true tactic of employers to drive down all wages. But the cursory sketch laid out here does not even begin to discuss the very many oppressions — of immigrants, of people with disabilities, of gay people, of transgender people, of Native peoples, of elders, and more — that play an integral role in upholding the profitability of US capitalism.

"A flexible workforce needs an expanded management bureaucracy to oversee it."

Word lovers: Welcome to the "precariat."

In sociology and economics, the precariat is a social class formed by people suffering from precarity, which is a condition of existence without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare as well as being a member of a proletariat class of industrial workers who lack their own means of production and hence sell their labour to live. Specifically, it is applied to the condition of lack of job security, in other words intermittent employment or underemployment and the resultant precarious existence. The emergence of this class has been ascribed to the entrenchment of neoliberal capitalism.

Referencing the USSR, eh?

The era of cheap labour is over, by Paul Mason (The Guardian)

 ... The assertion that job security kills innovation is etched deep into the free-market mindset. The pursuit of flexible labour markets has, for the past 30 years, made it easy for bosses to hire and fire; and harder for workers to demand both higher wages and the higher security that comes with them. The zero-hours contract has become the symbol of this culture, but there is worse. Unions trying to organise precarious workers report many businesses where there is no contract at all. Temporary work, part-time work, contracts that guarantee just four hours work a week are all common in the low-pay sector.

The result is the precariat. A broad layer numbering in some countries 25% of the workforce, whose contracts are either temporary or informal, or who arrive via employment agencies.

Now, an influential study by economists at Delft University has concluded what many of us suspected. A flexible workforce needs an expanded management bureaucracy to oversee it. Because precarity damages trust, loyalty and commitment, say the Delft researchers, it demands more management and control. An entire generation of free-market workers has begun to act according to the factory adage of the old Soviet Union: “We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us” ...

 ... In Britain, three basic things would lay the groundwork for a more controlled shift of pricing power towards the workforce and away from employers: the right to a written contract; the obligation to publish salary bands for specific job titles in private-sector firms; and limiting temporary contracts to genuinely temporary or seasonal tasks.

More Sunday reading: "What role will the arts and humanities play in this brave new world?"

Accompany with black coffee.

Matt Burriesci: The Arts and Humanities Aren’t Worth a Dime, by Matt Burriesci (Guernica)

“The object of the education system, taken as whole, is not to produce hands for industry or to teach the young how to make a living. It is to produce responsible citizens.”
-Robert Maynard Hutchins, The University of Utopia

As one of the editors of the Great Books of the Western World, Robert Maynard Hutchins believed that Westerners were all participants in a Great Conversation that began in antiquity. Over the course of several thousand years of that conversation, Western civilization experimented with many different modes of political and economic organization. We have been a polis and we have been an empire; we have lived in feudal monarchies and free republics; we have been capitalist, mercantile, and socialist; we have been democratic and tyrannical. None of these systems has been permanent. Each model has given way to a new one.

The Western World once believed, as Aristotle did, that the political unit preceded the economic one. We changed our minds in the 17th century. John Locke argued that in order to have a government at all, one first had to embrace the concept of private property, and so political freedoms were dependent upon economic liberty. Governments existed for limited purposes, with the consent of the governed, and primarily to defend the property of free citizens. This economic freedom is also what Adam Smith meant when he wrote of the “Invisible Hand.” Smith argued that if individuals were free to choose their own labor, they would choose the most profitable labor possible. By doing so, each individual, guided by a force he or she did not understand (“an Invisible Hand”) would maximize the wealth of the nation.

Today we have come to understand economic metrics as the only units of measurement. We talk about “the marketplace of ideas,” as we “vote with our dollars.”