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In short, self-contained chapters, Marçal moves through the contradictions and errors flowing from Smith’s mistake. Although Marçal’s target is economics, her critique applies to social contract theorists and any philosophy that starts with the individual, as in the thought of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. Only a man, she suggests, would imagine independence rather than dependence as the basis for the human condition. Individualists make the mistake of economic thinking: They forget about their mothers. “No one reads books about childbirth in order to understand human existence,” Marçal writes. “We read Shakespeare. Or one of the great philosophers who write about how people spring from the earth like mushrooms and immediately start drafting social contracts with each other.” To the idea that human society begins with men negotiating for their individual security, Marçal replies, “Hardly.”
But to think about American slaves merely as coerced and unpaid laborers is to misunderstand the institution. Slaves weren’t just workers, the Sublettes remind the reader—they were human capital. The very idea that people could be property is so offensive that we tend retroactively to elide the designation, projecting onto history the less-noxious idea of the enslaved worker, rather than the slave as commodity. Mapping 20th-century labor models onto slavery spares us from reckoning with the full consequences of organized dehumanization, which lets us off too easy: To turn people into products means more than not paying them for their work.
In some ways, Zuckerberg seems the classic underdog. At Harvard, he is shut out of the elite campus clubs. In a school of suits, he wears hoodies. He is short, nerdy, and oh so Jewish, especially compared with the Olympian (literally) Winkelvosses. While the twins party with gyrating hotties, he codes. But Zuckerberg is not the nose-picking nerd-Everyman. The film portrays the upper-middle-class coder as phenomenally talented, more talented (he says outright in a deposition scene) than anyone else in the story. His frustration at not being allowed into Harvard’s exclusive finals clubs is not anger at selective institutions as such, but a quiet fury that his particular merit goes unacknowledged.
aaaahh
[...] wage theft isn't limited to fruit stands and single-factory garment manufacturers. "Some of the largest, most well-respected companies on the planet will shave a little time here, shave a little time there," Shalov says, "and at the end of the day if they end up saving money, if it helps their bottom line, that's what they're going to do." The Department of Labor is not equipped to spend years in litigation against every violator on the Fortune 500, while every violator on the Fortune 500 is absolutely prepared to spend years in litigation against the Department of Labor. The money field isn't even.
pano idea: someone acknowledges that they're doing wage theft, says it's ok cus it won't be enforced
By now you may have spotted the problem. When workers improve their skills it doesn’t entitle them to more pay, or ensure them more pay — it merely enables companies to pay more. And given the option, companies would rather not pay you more.
Employers like to talk about the “skills gap,” but there is a permanent and unbridgeable divide between the supply of and demand for skilled labor. Business owners want a flood of applicants for every position, who are so well-qualified that they require no training — and they want that flood of competition to allow them to offer lower pay. Workers, on the other hand, want to get paid as much as possible, preferably without having to apply for 100 gigs at a time, or spend a decade and tens of thousands of dollars developing their skills.
The idea that these two sets of interests could ever come into a happy balance is a myth perpetuated by factory owners looking for ways to save money.
[...] If there's one lesson we can learn from the War it's that fascists don't always lose. The arc of history is not a missile defense system and sometimes righteous solidarity makes for full prison camps.
oof
“We don’t plan to lose money,” the Shell analyst told me. When I met him, he was a young man, still completing his transition from geoscientist to bean counter. We talked over drinks as he explained how he ended up working at the multinational oil conglomerate—Shell acquired the small firm where he’d been a researcher—and how he hoped that switching to the energy industry’s finance side would provide job security as the oil and gas sector contracted. His role involved analyzing what kind of return Shell could expect from new wells if and when the company is compelled to relinquish them by climate restrictions. Of course, the wells would not then shut down. Rather, the analyst explained, they’d be sold to shadier operators who would continue to pump the wells at lower costs by evading safety and environmental regulations. The firm is incapable of aspiring to abandon its assets; as the analyst said, “We don’t plan to lose money.”
It’s easy to see how individuals are recruited—volunteer themselves, even—into projects that are hostile to their own existence.vii After all, every worker already does the same thing by definition, to a certain degree. Think back to the Shell example. No one wants to work at an underregulated oil field that’s flaring ten million cubic feet of gas every week. Nor would people choose to live in the world that kind of activity is rapidly creating, not if they got to pick. But if that’s workers’ only or even best way to fit into the social metabolism, to access the mediations between themselves and the world that make life possible, we know they’ll take it. They don’t have much of a choice. All the players are then compelled to cooperate: Shell needs to sell the field; the new operator needs to start flaring; and the workers need to operate it the way they’re told to. This doesn’t require us to think of humans as utility-maximizing automatons; the individuals involved could find themselves overcome with moral qualms and quit—people do it all the time. But that protest presents itself to the system as a personnel problem, not a structural challenge, and such personnel problems mostly solve themselves.
If Shell isn’t willing to plan to lose money, should we expect the Société des Hydrocarbures du Tchad to behave differently? The largest economies hope not, because they’ve continued investing tens of billions of dollars a year to finance oil and gas projects in poor nations.25 It’s nonsensical to blame the workers of Chad for the climate crisis—they rank among the least culpable people in the world, consuming fewer fossil fuels per person than the citizens of almost any other country on earth—yet their vulnerability puts the whole world at risk. That is the consequence of operating our social metabolism according to value production. It’s no one’s fault, not in particular. We all have to make a living, and these impersonal forces dictate which lives are worth it. Good luck trying to live one that’s not.
And yet the number of global private flights was at an all-time high in 2022—5.4 million.26 Of these, an 85 percent supermajority are private flights within the United States, jaunts of climate-destroying, carbon-intensive convenience taken by the American 1 percent, making up around one-sixth of total domestic air travel.27 But even if the numbers weren’t dramatic, and even if air travel weren’t a stubbornly unelectrifiable source of fossil fuel consumption, I think there’d be something worthwhile about challenging private jet usage just on principle. A marketcrafting strategy has to maintain credibility with the public, and that means the state has to show itself willing and able to protect public interests from its partners in the capitalist class. Private jet owners are a perfect target.