Given the description of the Web site, I'm not following the link because of how my work computer sucks.
That being said, based on the summary, I'd be much more worried about feudalism via student loans than via the sharing economy.
Beyond that of course capital would love to bring back serfdom!
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold graduation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the middle ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society, has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones....
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors," and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment." It has drowned the most heavenly ecstacies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom--Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
For progressives, shadowy tomorrow is always already 1966 or 1066.
The sharing economy looks like piecework to me, not serfdom.Historically I think that meant even more starvation.
The only really annoying pop-up I get from that site is the one that requires you to sign up for a free account in order to read it. Which is definitely annoying and I resisted it for a while, but FT Alphaville regularly provides some of the best economic analysis on the Internet. It's a must-read page for me on economics.
Platforms should not, in other words, make it impossible for you to leave their territory because upping and leaving means letting go of your digital reputation, verification and earned social rights.
I think this is a really important point. I remember seeing an article, which I can't find right now, about somebody in NY who had been making an (okay) living doing handyman work on taskrabbit. At some point they changed their process for how bids got handled, in a way which didn't work for him, and he had no way to go somewhere else and keep his accumulated positive reviews.
OTOH, while it's obvious all of the ways in which the "sharing economy" reduces the leverage of workers, I think Yglesias made a good point* recently that we shouldn't go too far trying to figure out the meaning of trends which might just be side effects of the fact that the labor market has been terrible for the last six years -- and the labor market might be getting better.
* trigger warning: slightly annoying Yglesias writing style.
I've actually been thinking of writing an e-book on technology-driven inequality. Sharing economy is one part of the equation, but I think Ouishare is right to put the finger on "platforms" as the culprit. There seems to be less and less flexibility for those wishing to operate outside of a few dominant "platforms."
Like, down here instead of buying a mobile broadband plan that gives you the full internet, you could save a bunch of money by getting a broadband plan that just gives you Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. That's could well end up being the most accessible connectivity option for lower socioeconomic folks on their $35 Chinese smartphones. Oh, I think they also throw in Wikipedia, which is a nice abrogation of the commons for commercial purposes.
The sharing economy looks like piecework to me, not serfdom. Historically I think that meant even more starvation.
From what has been shown so far, it follows that piece-wage is the form of wages most in harmony with the capitalist mode of production. Although by no means new it figures side by side with time-wages officially in the French and English labour statutes of the 14th century it only conquers a larger field for action during the period of manufacture, properly so-called. In the stormy youth of modern industry, especially from 1797 to 1815, it served as a lever for the lengthening of the working-day, and the lowering of wages. Very important materials for the fluctuation of wages during that period are to be found in the Blue books: "Report and Evidence from the Select Committee on Petitions respecting the Corn Laws" (Parliamentary Session of 1813-14), and "Report from the Lords' Committee, on the State of the Growth, Commerce, and Consumption of Grain, and all Laws relating thereto" (Session of 1814-15). Here we find documentary evidence of the constant lowering of the price of labour from the beginning of the anti-Jacobin War. In the weaving industry, e.g., piece-wages had fallen so low that, in spite of the very great lengthening of the working-day, the daily wages were then lower than before. "The real earnings of the cotton weaver are now far less than they were; his superiority over the common labourer, which at first was very great, has now almost entirely ceased. Indeed... the difference in the wages of skillful and common labour is far less now than at any former period."
Expropriate the intermediators.
More than once, in correspondence on okcupid suggesting I and my correspondent begin communicating via a different medium, I've referred to the suggested change as "disintermediating the intermediary".
That could also mean going without a condom.
Expropriate the intermediators.
[P]iece-wages facilitate the interposition of parasites between the capitalist and the wage-labourer, the "sub-letting of labour." The gain of these middlemen comes entirely from the difference between the labour-price which the capitalist pays, and the part of that price which they actually allow to reach the labourer.
Has Karl Marx posted here before? Should I send him a fruit basket?
So by "feudalism" we mean "various powerful institutions/actors in secure positions exploiting the vast majority"? Because that has much more recent and better comparisons like the monopoly era. Serfdom at least offered people a level of security, no?
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Important enough to violate teo's rule: Baltimore grand jury has indicted the six officers.
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6: Interesting article but several times I found myself thinking "is that actually the point?" The last point, for example:
In March 2009, the urban theorist Richard Florida predicted that the crash would transform the geography of the American economy in a permanent way... But there's been no change in the underlying forces driving suburban sprawl. The American population continues to move on net away from central cities and toward the suburbs. Part of the story is that most people -- including most young people -- say they prefer suburban living. And even the minority who do like living in central cities are faced with the problem that NIMBY barriers to building new houses in thriving cities like New York and San Francisco make it difficult for them to gain net population.
Maybe so, but it would still be interesting if people were moving to the suburbs less than they used to once you controlled for the economy. It's one thing to say that people prefer suburban living overall, but do young people prefer it as strongly as older people do, or not? Are those NIMBY regulations Yglesias is obsessed over getting stronger or weaker? Anyone who would suggest that things had already changed for good would be an idiot, so it's a good thing nobody did, but which was in the trend going?
In Yglesias' defense, he provides links I didn't follow. I'm just being lazy left and right here. Commenting when it's time to go home from work again.
So by "feudalism" we mean "various powerful institutions/actors in secure positions exploiting the vast majority"? Because that has much more recent and better comparisons like the monopoly era. Serfdom at least offered people a level of security, no?
In England, serfdom had practically disappeared in the last part of the 14th century. The immense majority of the population consisted then, and to a still larger extent, in the 15th century, of free peasant proprietors, whatever was the feudal title under which their right of property was hidden. In the larger seignorial domains, the old bailiff, himself a serf, was displaced by the free farmer. The wage-labourers of agriculture consisted partly of peasants, who utilised their leisure time by working on the large estates, partly of an independent special class of wage-labourers, relatively and absolutely few in numbers. The latter also were practically at the same, time peasant farmers, since, besides their wages, they had allotted to them arable land to the extent of 4 or more acres, together with their cottages, Besides they, with the rest of the peasants, enjoyed the usufruct of the common land, which gave pasture to their cattle, furnished them with timber, fire-wood, turf, &c....Such conditions, together with the prosperity of the towns so characteristic of the 15th century, allowed of that wealth of the people which Chancellor Fortescue so eloquently paints in his "Laudes legum Angliae"; but it excluded the possibility of capitalistic wealth.
That could also mean going without a condom.
I said "communicating", not "conversing".
'Two generations were sacrificed to the creation of an industrial base.' [...] 'The worker cannot buy with his regular pay the bread, meat and clothes necessary for his upkeep and that of his family.' [...] We may query the exact figures he gives, but not the general impoverishment he was condemning.
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15 - It looks like the charges they settled on are going to cause a bit of a headache for the people out there arguing that Mosby was overreaching with her charges for opportunistic political reasons.
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the people out there arguing that Mosby was overreaching with her charges for opportunistic political reasons
All the chorus of calumny, which the Party of Order never fail, in their orgies of blood, to raise against their victims, only proves that the bourgeois of our days considers himself the legitimate successor to the baron of old, who thought every weapon in his own hand fair against the plebeian, while in the hands of the plebeian a weapon of any kind constituted in itself a crime.
Honestly, this is the stupidest shit I encounter. Why do newspaper articles never consider how much of CA agriculture it takes to supply the country? They assume that because CA ag provides a lot of the countries market crops, it takes all of CA ag to do that. But that's not true at all. We're also supplying a lot of feed to animals and luxuries to the rest of the world. Why on earth would Americans voluntarily forego an extra tomato when they could instead impose a wine shortage on Canadians or an almond shortage on Chinese people? Or hell, less feed to beef animals in Japan and China. Is there something sacred about international exports that I don't understand?
Why don't these articles ever start from acreage?
Gotta go, so I won't respond until tomorrow. But I couldn't leave without ranting somewhere.
23:Is there something sacred about international exports that I don't understand?
It's called free trade, if Japan is willing and able to pay twenty dollars for a tomato, Americans have to starve. Commodities must sell to highest bidder. What, you a protectionist?
And TPP fastrack just passed the Senate. Well, something did. Thanks Difi! Thanks Obama!
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Going off topic, since this appears to be the thread for it: I'm glad I got to see some of the treasures of Palmyra some years ago, given that they're now likely to be stolen or destroyed.
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It's called free trade, if Japan is willing and able to pay twenty dollars for a tomato, Americans have to starve. Commodities must sell to highest bidder. What, you a protectionist?
Let us assume for a moment that there are no more Corn Laws or national or local custom duties; in fact that all the accidental circumstances which today the worker may take to be the cause of his miserable condition have entirely vanished, and you will have removed so many curtains that hide from his eyes his true enemy....
[I]n general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.
If Japan is willing and able to pay $20 for a tomato, we would be stupid not to sell it to them.
Apparently Saana is really literally running out of water.
6: I remember seeing an article, which I can't find right now, about somebody in NY who had been making an (okay) living doing handyman work on taskrabbit.
That would be this thing I linked to some time in the last month or so.
Apparently Yemen used up all its water growing Qat. What I think we should do is grow Qat in California, and ship it to Yemen. For humanitarian purposes.
California's not looking so promising either.
I'm sort of curious to try Qat, but I don't know how to get any.
Marx is winning this thread. Best new commenter!
I thought that was just bob on Qat.
That would be Stras.
How else can you take your reputation and your accumulated credit with you to another territory or platform without having to start again?
I'm convinced that the economy is rapidly worsening as far as its ability to help the common person, but I don't get this complaint. It's true that you can't easily take your reputation with you, but I don't think of that as being very medieval. The idea that it might be otherwise is pretty anomalous.
I don't see how that is necessarily linked to the sharing economy either.
I bet Engels is paying for Marx's internet connection.
I am loving Karl, but also Fernand who, although less prolific thus far, I fell confident is playing a long game.
40 - as I understand it the "platforms" ruthlessly police any attempts by the service providers to build up a personal client base of repeat customers. At least here in SF building a base of solid repeat customers can be an important part of a cabby's financial success. The "platforms" are determined to prevent this as part of their strategy to further disempower workers.
32: Thank you. That was what I was thinking of, and it is a good article.
35 Philadelphia taxi drivers, iirc. I'm sure TFA have my account of chewing the stuff in Sana'a; maybe under a different name>
29 -- Bigger problems, as the Saudi-US-Al Qaeda alliance is trying to bomb them into thinking the ex-president who's behind the bombing is a better deal than the ex-before-last president currently ensconced in the city. I'm sure just a few more days of bombing, and people will want him back.
Well, obviously bigger problems. I'm really unclear why the US is participating in the thing, given, as you say, it puts us in alliance with Al Qaeda. Are we just trying to balance out the karma from our alliance with Iran up in Mesopotamia?
Disrupt disrupt disrupt! (Insert the appropriate Bob the Angry Flower link here.)
49: I guess it's good news that those guys are starting to understand how societies work and why government exists.
If they still want to try to create a libertarian paradise without government interference, maybe they could try to disrupt the qat industry in Yemen.
Aww man. I was really hoping they'd have to learn those lessons through experience.
I'm sure you could talk them into giving it another try.
"C'mon guys, we can raise the money for our libertarian island paradise if we put on a show!"
"We can put it on in the old barn"
"We can use that pile of scrap lumber for the set!"
"We can use some old curtains for curtains!"
Speaking of curtains, particularly beautiful fabric for new curtains has been obtained @ $6/yd, yay! And the talking goat photo is still in the running, although that was a close call.
J Robot, thinking of you! Wishing you best of all possible outcomes tomorrow! Would be delivering lovingly made haut pablum if I could!
I guess it's good news that those guys are starting to understand how societies work and why government exists.
The executive of the modern state is nothing but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie
I think Yglesias made a good point* recently that we shouldn't go too far trying to figure out the meaning of trends which might just be side effects of the fact that the labor market has been terrible for the last six years -- and the labor market might be getting better.
Not read the whole thread, but I don't see any signs the labour market is getting better. OK, unemployment in the UK isn't particularly high, but underemployment, and underpayment is rife. And a lot of the nastier aspects of the current labour market pre-date the 2008 crash/recession/endless-opportunity-for-the-rich.
The problem described in the OP is real, but describing it as "feudal" or "medieval" is bizarre. Serfs and villeins _couldn't_ leave their manors; the bond to their lords wasn't "you'd have to give up your valuables", it was "you'd be punished with brute force". Trying to create a monopoly based on increasing returns to scale, though, is as capitalist as apple pie or U.S. Steel.
(At first I thought Uncle Karl was actually Gnoled, who's interested in feudalism and likes to troll lefties this way, but 56 doesn't seem like his style somehow.)
but 56 doesn't seem like his style somehow.
Its the Qat speaking.
Heebie, lots of us know who Karl Marx is. His Communist Manifesto is kind of popular. But good for you!
Karl is obviously another entertainment industry lawyer gone to the bad
62 <hipster> I think he's gone downhill since he started chasing popularity, but I still listen to Theses on Feuerbach from time to time. </hipster>
Remember when we were all so excited to get his latest book and none of us would admit that we couldn't finish it?
65 got me thinking that someone should do a mashup of Finnegan's Wake and Das Kapital. And then I thought bob is probably the one to do it.
When I have a leisure moment, you will generally find me curled up with Spinoza's latest.
68 is excellent, crown emoji.
44 is my understanding also, and I would think is the understanding of everyone trying to use the platforms for anything over recreation or noncritical communication. If that view is widespread among people who pay or contribute useful data, then I'd expect serial short-lived monopolies rather than stable and predictable businesses. But valuations and capital flow towards platforms are pretty optimistic.
49: I had an extended email exchange with Patri Friedman way back when he first founded the Seasteading Institute. He had this weird obsession with land, somehow his island utopia had to have lots of surface area. I pointed out that a seastead is necessarily going to have a local economy oriented towards the sea rather than land based activities, but he was adamant. I also pointed out that a tramp steamer can be had for relatively little, and has already solved all the engineering challenges of life at sea. All that's needed is to turn the holds into condos and you're set. Apparently that's unacceptable because it does not scale the way floating concrete lilly pads do.
I've followed a bunch of libertarian attempts to found their own little countries, and they generally seem to fail due to the principals unwillingness to accept significant hardship. One notable exception is the dude who bought a dredge and started building up a subsurface coral reef only to have his new country invaded and annexed by Tonga. The Republic of Minerva was it's name, IIRC.
I ask you, what has changed? Has the danger from the Russian side been lessoned? No. Rather, the delusion of the ruling classes of Europe has reached its pinnacle. Above all, nothing has changed in Russia's policy, as her official historian Karamsin admits. Her methods, her tactics, her maneuvers may change, but the pole star -- world domination -- is immutable. Only a crafty government, ruling over a mass of barbarians, could devise such a plan nowadays.
--Karl Marx
70.2: That's probably just fucking up a perfectly nice reef.
The democratic regime is the most aristocratic way of ruling. It is possible only to a rich nation.
only to have his new country invaded and annexed by Tonga
My first thought was to wonder what the defense plan looked like. If China rolls up with a bunch of boats and planes and says "Actually, we've got an ancient historical fishing-rights claim to these floating concrete lily pads, kthxbye," what do the Freedom Floaters do? Call the [gasp!] U.S. government?
66: Zizek has probably beaten me to it.
This will be incoherent, but its all nascent. Why I read what I read.
I haven't been keeping up with Uber and sharing economy. I think there was something good at New Inquiry. But yes, I see something like neo-feudalism coming on, but not really about paid labor but the more profitable unpaid labor.
Can't find the piece I read this week about I think Facebook setting up proprietary deals with content providers. It talked about Facebook using its billions to soon trap its users.
Appadurai 5 spheres and Social Imaginary
The image, the imagined, the imaginary - these are all terms that direct us to something critical and new in global cultural processes: the imagination as a social practice. No longer mere fantasy (opium for the masses whose real work is somewhere else), no longer simple escape (from a world defined principally by more concrete purposes and structures), no longer elite pastime (thus not relevant to the lives of ordinary people), and no longer mere contemplation (irrelevant for new forms of desire and subjectivity), the imagination has become an organized field of social practices, a form of work (in the sense of both labor and culturally organized practice), and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility. This unleashing of the imagination links the play of pastiche (in some settings) to the terror and coercion of states and their competitors. The imagination is now central to all forms of agency, is itself a social fact, and is the key component of the new global order.[7]
I do think of the social imaginary in pretty much geographical terms (Jameson, Harvey), and believe that post-capitalism does involve attaching you to a "domain" and as long as they control what you see and where you text, comment, and post etc, surplus and profits will spontaneously emerge without much supervision or control. If only selling your preferences to advertisers. To a large degree earlier feudalisms prospered without much capital investment or command, in fact infrastructure (roads) often hurt manorial profits.
The language just hasn't quite evolved yet to describe the container 1.4 billion Facebook users are captured in.
I think Yglesias made a good point recently that we shouldn't go too far trying to figure out the meaning of trends which might just be side effects of the fact that the labor market has been terrible for the last six years -- and the labor market might be getting better.
[T]he working class will sometimes be more fortunate. It will sometimes receive something above the minimum, but this surplus will merely make up for the deficit which it will have received below the minimum in times of industrial stagnation. That is to say that, within a given time which recurs periodically, in the cycle which industry passes through while undergoing the vicissitudes of prosperity, overproduction, stagnation and crisis, when reckoning all that the working class will have had above and below necessaries, we shall see that, in all, it will have received neither more nor less than the minimum; i.e., the working class will have maintained itself as a class after enduring any amount of misery and misfortune, and after leaving many corpses upon the industrial battlefield. But what of that? The class will still exist; nay, more, it will have increased.
I'm not going to read yglesias, life being short, but unless his position is pretty seriously tempered by recognition that there are aggressive moves afoot to change the regulatory landscape and those changes will likely long outlast any change for the better in the labor market then he's an even bigger tool than I thought he was.
. . . recognition that there are aggressive moves afoot to change the regulatory landscape and those changes will likely long outlast any change for the better in the labor market then he's an even bigger tool than I thought he was.
I don't think I agree with that.
Or, rather, I agree that there are ongoing problems with the balance of power between employers and employees but I'm not convinced that the "sharing economy" is the best place to start (I see it as a symptom, not a leading edge of the problem), and I'm also not convinced that it makes sense to focus on current* "aggressive moves afoot" rather than seeing the present moment as just one part of a very long story (and a story which contains victories as well as defeats for the power of employees).
I mean, in Winner Take All Politics Hacker and Pierson were talking about the time period of 1979 to 2007, and they say this:
Oh, it is. It's a mystery when you start to look beneath the familiar, common statement that inequality has grown. Because when you think about rising inequality, we think, "Oh, it's the haves versus the have-nots." That the top third of the income distribution, say, is pulling away from the bottom third.
And what we found is it's not the haves versus the have-nots. It's the have-it-alls versus the rest of Americans. And those have-it-alls, which are households in say the top one-tenth of one percent of the income distribution, the richest one-in-a-thousand households are truly living in an unparalleled age.
Since we've been keeping records on the incomes of the richest from tax statistics in the early 20th century, we never saw as large a share of national income going to the richest one-in-a-thousand households as we did just before the great recession.
Their share of national income quadrupled over this period, to the point where they were pulling down about one in eight dollars in our economy. One-in-a-thousand households pulling down about one in eight dollars in our economy before the great recession began.
Which is to say that there are plenty of "aggressive moves" which have already happened -- and people tying to figure out how to push back on them. I don't know if that will succeed or fail, if the pendulum of politics will swing back, away from the top .1%, but I think if it does it's going to be a much longer and much broader fight than one over regulatory changes that are currently in the political pipeline.
* I do think one issue that is both pressing and particularly contemporary are fights over employee privacy as surveillance technology becomes cheaper and ubiquitous.
44, 69.2: Indeed, where the "platforms" in question serve up goods or services, there's been a deliberate push to describe the providers of said services -- the people who actually do the work -- as "suppliers." There's an increasing emphasis on the notion that the real value supplied is provided by the platform itself, whether a cab company or an online handyman site or, actually, Amazon. Customers are increasingly inclined to describe the provider as a supplier, to act as though any given provider (worker) is interchangeable with another. It's inches away from describing, say, a teacher as a supplier.