Our Collective Future

The major economic problem in the United States today is: not enough work to do. Capitalism has taken us to a period of post-scarcity, where there is a surplus of consumer goods and simply not enough work to go around. It sounds like an ideal situation - more than enough for everyone with time to spare. Within the constraints of capitalism, however, lack of scarcity is an absolute disaster. Lack of scarcity translates to lack of demand, which generates unemployment. Unemployment translates to under-consumption, which generates even less demand. Repeat.

This deflationary cycle reared its head most viciously in the 1930s, and that near economic collapse gave birth to managed capitalism. Wherever possible, the US government will now cultivate conditions of artificial scarcity. Since there is too much food, the state pays a rotating set of farmers not to grow crops. Later, the state will observe the results of a harvest, adjust its numbers, and buy up tons of the harvest yield to rot away in silos (or dump on foreign countries). Otherwise, faced with an enormous supply, prices will fall and the agricultural market will fail. Capitalism must subvert itself in order to survive.

Currently, we're hovering on the cusp of this deflationary cycle. Not enough people are able to find work, which means many people don't have money to spend on superfluous products. The people selling superfluous products (most Americans) can't stay in business, and themselves become unemployed, continuing the cycle. Tactics for breaking the cycle include tax breaks (giving lots of people money and hoping that they spend it), as well as low interest rates (lending people money and hoping that they spend it). Usually unspoken, all of this becomes very clear in campaigns like "America: Open For Business" - where the message is very overtly: "Please, buy stuff." But, as of June 2004, more than 17 million US citizens can't find any work to do.¹ Where power does not break us, it seduces us - and seduced by capitalism's siren song, most of those frustrated by the current state of economics are playing right along by demanding "more jobs." But if we stop and think about this for five seconds, shouldn't we be demanding less jobs? Have things really gotten so bad that we smile and cheer when a politician promises to generate more work for us to do?

It's difficult to figure out what's really going on, because the highly publicized employment statistics are somewhat incomplete and fairly deceptive. The Bureau of Labor Statistics claims that the current unemployment rate is 5.6%. However, the BLS considers a person to be 'employed' if they're working as little as one hour a week. By 'unemployed', they mean someone who works less than one hour a week, is registered for unemployment, and has actively been looking for a job in the past four months. So while there are 8.2 million people that the BLS considers 'unemployed', there are 4.9 million people working as little as one hour a week that are looking for more work, 1.5 million people who have given up trying to find a job in the past four months, and 2.03 million people who have been incarcerated.¹ There is a whole other group of people who went on disability because they were disabled, but now find it impossible to return to wwork given the economic climate. Given the choice between maintaining their disability payments or being unemployed and destitute, they choose to continue on disability. So, all told, the number of people unemployed in the United States today is more like 17 million. There are 114 million people working full-time, which means that it takes about 4.56 billion person-hours of work each week to generate our current level of stuff. If we agree that this is a period of post-scarcity and there isn't actually a shortage of goods, it would make sense to divide up the current amount of work amongst everyone instead of creating more work for those who are unemployed. If all 131 million people do the 4.56 billion person-hours of work each week, it comes out to 35 hours/person. All of a sudden, the work week is 5 hours shorter.

What's worse, it's still more than we should be doing. Currently, consumer choice is controlled by the market alone. If I'm not interested in a product, or think it's unnecessary, the only thing I can do is refuse to buy it. If enough people refuse to buy it, the company may go out of business and the product we all dislike will no longer be produced. The disciples of capitalism see this as a brilliant manifestation of natural selection. But just how powerful is my choice? If I refuse to buy something, the company that produces it might go out of business, but that will only increase unemployment without benefiting me in any way. In fact, an increase in unemployment might hurt me if I have something to sell of my own. If I listen to "America: Open For Business," I might realize that it's actually in my best interest to buy useless crap. So in a very real sense, I don't have much of a choice as a consumer at all.

In the absence of powerful consumer choice, we've been flooded with crap: vinyl fish, three-speed authentic-leather massage chairs, refrigerator poetry magnets, whiz-bang software, and pre-peeled garlic cloves. People are choosing to buy miniature ceramic replicas of their dogs because, well, why not? Right now, if we all decide that products sold at the Sharper Image are worthless, the company goes out of business and unemployment numbers go up. But what if, instead, we take the total amount of work remaining and divide it with everyone that's unemployed? If we divide up the work that everyone in our community is doing with everyone else that's already unemployed, as well as those newly unemployed Sharper Image workers - everyone works less. Since there was never a shortage of anything to begin with, it's an all-around win. All of a sudden, consumer choice has meaning. Maybe I'd think twice about wanting someone to produce a 97" flat-screen plasma TV if not having it means I work 2hrs less each week.

Trade Unions And Capitalism

Unfortunately, trade unions have only maintained the scarcity mindset. Union leaders echo the quixotic cry for "more jobs!" and focus almost exclusively on maintaining an artificial level of work to be done. This was incredibly evident, for instance, in the 2001 ILWU strike. For those who don't remember: a container comes off a ship with a number stamped on it. There are union workers employed to record that number on a list, and at the end of the day all of the lists are left in a big office, where more union workers compile and manage all of the numbers on the lists. Management wanted to start putting barcodes on the containers, so that they're scanned when they arrive and a computer automatically manages the inventory.

This is technology which can potentially reduce the amount of work that collectively needs to be done. But within the context of a trade union's relationship to capitalism, this is technology to be opposed. If it's introduced, some union workers lose their jobs and everyone else still has to work the same amount. Ideally, those jobs would be eliminated, the people who were doing them would stay on, and the remaining work would be divided amongst everyone (while maintaining the same level of renumeration). But trade unions aren't in a position to make that happen, so the ILWU went on a weeks-long strike, payed out gobs of cash in strike wages, and had people whispering about things like Taft-Hartley³ all over again. All so that we can do more work.

However backwards it is, this is clearly necessary and important action to take in order to protect workers here and now - but let's not make this tactic our strategy.

How Do We Get There From Here? Or: We Don't Want A Slice, We Want The Whole Fucking Pie

I'm going to suggest that we forget about unions as a strategy. I think all of the romance and nostalgia associated with the labor movement has us trapped in a mindset where reviving the IWW is the key to revolution. I think we need to take a step back and look at why unions were necessary in the first place. When it costs a bazillion dollars to build a factory, it makes sense to unionize the workers of that factory and negotiate with the boss. But let's face it, today the United States is a service-oriented economy where normal startup costs do not begin to approach a bazillion dollars. Should our strategy be to unionize an existing bike-messenger company and negotiate with a boss through the National Labor Relations Board when it's almost easier to start a bike-messenger worker-collective instead? Worker-collectives give us total job control, empower us to make (not negotiate) the day-to-day decisions which workers are affected by, and strike back against the alienation and exploitation inherent in labor and profit.

If we focus on worker-collectives, there is potential for dramatic transformation. First of all, maintaining busywork is no longer an issue within a collectivized workplace. If the workers find a way to introduce efficiency and do less work - it's to their benefit. Members of a worker collective have the freedom to eliminate entire jobs without actually laying anyone off, simultaneously reducing the amount of remaining work for everyone. We can finally start to give a meaningful voice to the cry for less jobs, not more.

As the number of worker-collectives increases, these transformations can begin to increase in scope. Networks of worker-collectives can share resources and develop means of exchange that are not based on the market², which could even enable the support of important services that the market does not currently value (like child care, community projects, and other forms of community support).³ For instance, it could be possible to manage risk with the networked capital of several worker-collectives as an alternative to the insurance racket. Insurance is the type of thing that is easy to provide if you have a lot of money. With a large amount of collective capital, networks of worker-collectives could effectively offer affordable health-insurance by eliminating insurance profit and managing the risk with their own money.

As the amount of capital available under networked collectives increases, these networks can pool together seed money in order to fund the creation of larger collectives which require more startup capital - building a sort of free-credit collective bank. These larger collectives could include those factories that do cost a bazillion dollars to build, perhaps even replacing corporate manufacturers that other collectives buy from. In this way, a network of collectives can grow up the production chain.

If we can spend hard hours negotiating with management and unionizing workers, we can build our own world without bosses. We're the ones doing the work, and we've known that we can do it ourselves all along. Revolution smiles out of the corner of its mouth every time someone asks "Wait, you don't have a boss?" So let's start salting the creating of new worker-collectives instead of the unionization of corporate businesses. Let's start demanding less jobs, not more.

Footnotes:
1: Bureau Of Labor Statistics
2: See Michael Albert and Participatory Economics for one example.
3: The Network Of Bay Area Worker Collectives (NoBAWC) is a very preliminary example of this.