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A new California court ruling could upend these predatory practices. This landmark decision, known as the Dynamex ruling, makes it harder for companies to misclassify their workers as independent contractors in order to avoid paying taxes and benefits. It’s not just dancers who are misclassified this way but also Uber and Lyft drivers, construction workers, hairstylists, programmers, sales associates, dog walkers, journalists, truckers, janitors, warehouse workers, homecare workers, and many more. Since the 1970s, a wave of industries have reclassified their employees in this manner. The app-enabled gig economy has only accelerated the trend.
After the ruling, publications like Forbes touted the advantage of being an independent contractor. Their articles extolled the benefits of collecting untaxed wages — never mind that filing taxes as a freelancer remains an unparalleled nightmare — and “making your own hours.” As every stripper knows, however, making your own schedule is a ruse. I was attracted to stripping for its supposed freedom — I loved the promise of making my own hours. But as it turned out, flexibility didn’t actually mean freedom for me, it simply meant I had to match management’s shifting needs and expectations. Management will pressure you into taking the shifts they want covered. I was free to choose “weekend hours” as long as I picked up on the clues that I needed to work longer hours and take extra shifts during the week to keep my schedule. [...]
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First of all, there is no housing crisis.
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Housing is not in crisis.
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Housing needs no trauma counselors.
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Housing needs no lawyers. Housing needs no comrades or friends. Housing needs no representatives. Housing needs no organizers.
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When we call this crisis a housing crisis, it benefits the people who design housing, who build housing, who profit from housing, not the people who live in it.
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It encourages us to think in abstractions, in numbers, in interchangeable “units,” and not about people, or about power.
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We don’t have a housing crisis. We have a tenants’ rights crisis.
goddamn
Rent abolition takes for granted the basic principle of social housing: to provide homes for all, proletarians must collectively control land and housing. Rent abolition means ending land ownership in all its forms. The problem isn’t housing supply, but the entire social relationship — the relationship between proletarian tenants and landlords; between proletarian builders, plumbers, and electricians and the capitalist firms that employ them; between proletarians in general and the state. Abolishing these social relationships requires an offensive on two fronts: for free housing for all, and against attempts to profit from ownership, construction, and management. In a sense, the rent strike is not just a weapon in this struggle but the thing entire. We need a permanent rent strike. Until then, wherever people refuse to pay for shelter, wherever others join them in defense, we can see a path through the smoke.
Dotted with “death villages” where crops will not fruit, the region of Inner Mongolia where the Bayan Obo mine is located displays Chernobylesque cancer rates. But then again, the death villages are already here. More of them are coming if we don’t do something about climate change. What matter is a dozen death villages when half the earth may be rendered uninhabitable? What matter the gray skies over Inner Mongolia if the alternative is turning the sky an endless white with sulfuric aerosols, as last-ditch geoengineering scenarios imagine? Moralists, armchair philosophers, and lesser-evilists may try to convince you that these situations resolve into a sort of trolley-car problem: do nothing and the trolley speeds down the track toward mass death. Do something, and you switch the trolley onto a track where fewer people die, but where you are more actively responsible for their deaths. When the survival of millions or even billions hangs in the balance, as it surely does when it comes to climate change, a few dozen death villages might seem a particularly good deal, a green deal, a new deal. But climate change doesn’t resolve into a single trolley-car problem. Rather, it’s a planet-spanning tangle of switchyards, with mass death on every track.
not 100% convinced i follow this argument but i do enjoy the rhetoric flourish
Counting emissions within national boundaries, in other words, is like counting calories but only during breakfast and lunch. If going clean in the US makes other places dirtier, then you’ve got to add that to the ledger. The carbon sums are sure to be lower than they would be otherwise, but the reductions might not be as robust as thought, especially if producers desperate to cash in on the renewable jackpot do things as cheaply and quickly as possible, which for now means fossil fuels. On the other side, environmental remediation is costly in every way. Want to clean up those tailings ponds, bury the waste deep underground, keep the water table from being poisoned? You’re going to need motors and you’re probably going to burn oil.
To replace current US energy consumption with renewables, you’d need to devote at least 25–50 percent of the US landmass to solar, wind, and biofuels, according to the estimates made by Vaclav Smil, the grand doyen of energy studies. Is there room for that and expanding human habitation? For that and pasture for a massive meat and dairy industry? For that and the forest we’d need to take carbon out of the air? Not if capitalism keeps doing the thing which it can’t not keep doing—grow. The law of capitalism is the law of more—more energy, more stuff, more materials. It introduces efficiencies only to more effectively despoil the planet. There is no solution to the climate crisis which leaves capitalism’s compulsions to growth intact. And this is what the Green New Deal, a term coined by that oily neoliberal, Thomas Friedman, doesn’t address. It thinks you can keep capitalism, keep growth, but remove the deleterious consequences. The death villages are here to tell you that you can’t. No roses will bloom on that bush.
It’s easy to get lost in the weeds here and lose sight of the essential. In each of these scenarios, on each of these sad, warming planets, the Green New Deal fails because capitalism. Because, in capitalism, a small class of owners and managers, in competition with itself, finds itself forced to make a set of narrow decisions about where to invest and in what, establishing prices, wages, and other fundamental determinants of the economy. Even if these owners wanted to spare us the drowned cities and billion migrants of 2070, they could not. They would be undersold and bankrupted by others. Their hands are tied, their choices constrained, by the fact that they must sell at the prevailing rate or perish. It is the class as a whole that decides, not its individual members. This is why the sentences of Marxists (and Marx) so often treat capital as agent rather than object. The will towards relentless growth, and with it increasing energy use, is not chosen, it is compelled, a requirement of profitability where profitability is a requirement of existence.
If you tax oil, capital will sell it elsewhere. If you increase demand for raw materials, capital will bid up the prices of commodities, and rush materials to market in the most wasteful, energy-intensive way. If you require millions of square miles for solar panels, wind farms, and biofuel crops, capital will bid up the price of real estate. If you slap tariffs on necessary imports, capital will leave for better markets. If you try to set a maximum price that doesn’t allow profit, capital will simply stop investing. Lop off one head of the hydra, face another. Invest trillions of dollars into infrastructure in the US and you’ll have to confront the staggeringly wasteful, slow, and unproductive construction industry, where laying a mile of subway can be twenty times as expensive and take four times as long. You’ll have to confront the earthen monsters of Bechtel and Fluor Corp., habituated to feeding at the government trough and billing fifty dollar screws. If this doesn’t chasten you, consider the world-historical inefficiency of the US military, the planet’s biggest oil consumer and, unsurprisingly, also the planet’s main oil cop. The Pentagon is an accounting black hole, into which the wealth of the nation is ploughed and from which no light emerges. Its balance sheet is a blank.
surely this leaves out the possibility of a subtle but important shift in systemic behavior due to changing social attitudes and legislation?
As I read this collection, I found myself thinking about an early debate between W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke about the possibility of a political black modernist art, a debate framed in terms of the relationship between art and propaganda. Du Bois famously declared that “all art is propaganda and ever must be”: that is, all cultural production under capitalism necessarily serves ruling interests, so black artists have an obligation to take the side of the oppressed. Locke rejoined that propaganda (or, in more contemporary terms, protest) “perpetuates the position of group inferiority even in crying out against it. For it leaves and speaks under the shadow of a dominant majority whom it harangues, cajoles, threatens or supplicates.” Both ultimately describe the conditions of art, and reveal the falseness of the binary between “political” and “middle class” poetry I described previously. However, if one is to avoid the poetry of pity, which provides an affective release for the oppressor, or of cheap solidarity, which can preclude historical and political understanding of domination, the question is how one is to take sides. The strength of Heaven Is All Goodbyes in this regard is that it manages to transcend empty sloganeering and refuse the seductions of easy pessimism, bombastic militancy, or unearned optimism. Its value is not its interpretation or representation of the world, though poetry inevitably represents, and representation is an interpretation of the world. Rather, it invites readers to examine their attachments; it helps generate new concepts and encourages aesthetic and political experimentation; and it invites readers to a world, this one, where we might live otherwise.
idk this book but im intrigued by this analysis
[...] these works expose what might be taken by such a reader as simply being "given" as a picture - and therefore something that might be relinquished - or chosen - as opposed to being merely reproduced or capitulated to. Although there is nothing wrong with their doing so, readers need not "identify" with the characters in a book in order for this process to occur; it would be better to say that, if the critics description is convincing enough, readers will be unable to escape recognizing the image of themselves in the book. To call that recognition philosophical is simply to refer back to the notion [...] of philosophy as a self-critical activity, whose aim is to produce a kind of (self-)knowledge, unlikely to be arrived at through either unexamined practical experience or "pure" logical analysis. [...]
on imaginative literaure as discussed by Robert Pippin and Stanley Cavell
[...] For Hegel, art was one of the organs through which a society could reflect on - by making explicit to itself - its form of life, which meant not only its habits of thought or speech but also the institutional structures and power relations that continuously shaped those habits. Much of Pippin's philosophical criticism is devoted to making explicit how novelists like James and Proust can help us recognize configurations of thought that are less eccentric than common, less a function of individual history than of "the situation of modernity itself". One of his recurrent points is that exclusively psychological readings of individual action can itself become a sociohistorical habit, so seemingly "natural" to us that we cease to see it as a choice?
That so much of our social and communal life has become so fine-grained and circumstantail that is it difficult, from any amount of distance, to see as anything other than the result of arbitrary pathology is in large part why Pippin believes the novel "might be the great modern philosophical form". He means that novels can show in a manner that philosophy cannot - or has not been inclined to - how ordinary people struggle to be recognized as moral agents and to do justice to the claims of others in th everyday social world. [...]