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Catalyst
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[...] if the eurozone were to disband, the main losers would be Germany,
Austria, and in, even greater proportion, the European tax havens (Lux-
embourg, Netherlands), who would see the deterioration of their agents’
balance sheets. In such a scenario, Portugal and above all Greece would see
a boom in their public debt. This would necessarily have to lead to a — in
any case desirable — restructuring process.
However, beyond that, the financial and nonfinancial private sectors
of each of these two economies, and the rest of the countries taken as a
whole, would see their position improve. In other words, the expressions
of financial fragility would be concentrated at the very points where there
exist situations in dire need of resolving – i.e., the public debt of peripheral
countries in need of relief, and tax havens — and within those countries
whose financial situation is sufficiently robust that slight damage to certain
sectors’ financial balance sheet could be absorbed without any major shock.
Neoliberal policies are at the very heart of the European Union. This demands that the social and political organizations of the Left find the avenues that will allow them to activate a new plan for the Continent, running against the forms that the integration process has taken in the past. Between a simple reenactment of what went before in the name of the European ideal, or a Euroscepticism that is just a stunted version of a retreat into nationalism, I suggest that there is also an alternative strategy: namely, the project of a selective de-integration and re-integration of Europe. The objective is to keep open the channels of cooperation between European states, while at the same time acquiring greater room for manoeuvre, in order to reactivate a socialist and environmentalist socioeconomic project. In other words, the goal is to change the hierarchy of the questions around which European integration is organized.
The fate of the single currency is central to such a perspective, given its deflationary bias, the unilateral character of the adjustments that it imposes, and the resulting loss of diversity in socio-productive systems. In theory, a European fiscal system that allowed the rapid rise of a welfare state, an ambitious industrial policy, and consequential regional programs, could change the social nature of the existing monetary order. In practice, the conditions of policymaking at the European level rule out any substantial change within the foreseeable future. This means that for the Left, it is an important political responsibility to embrace exit from the euro, a dismantling of the eurozone, or, preferably, the transformation of the euro into a common currency. Although it should be understood that is not an objective unto itself, but rather a means of taking back control of the political agenda, this question is nonetheless an unavoidable one. While such an institutional construction process poses important legal and political questions, there are no technical difficulties that preclude the adoption of such a course. On the contrary, as I have argued, the incentives structure that today sets creditor countries in opposition to debtor countries would be overturned through the perspective of abandoning the single currency, for each country would have an interest in cooperating to limit financial turbulence and finding a mutually beneficial arrangement.
Here, then, is the fundamental problem. Those who advocate for an emancipatory basic income policy while showing considerably less interest in the persistent dilemmas of class politics have forgotten, or failed to see, that what they are pushing for is already a form of communism. There is consequently no prospect of the hoped-for policy coming to pass until there is a working-class constituency that is organized and powerful enough to be able to extract it, in spite of the predictable resistance of superbly organized capital. The employers of labor are, after all, not about to expropriate themselves out of untold future profits out of the goodness of their hearts, much less because proponents of a generous basic income have fairness and human decency on their side.
In our view, the tendency persistently to overlook these facts owes to a certain familiar but problematic approach to normative inquiry. The problematic orientation is on display whenever theorists on the Left — rightly concerned by the many social ills we face — ask in response what sorts of policies “we” should put in place. This question makes practical sense only if author and audience together already have the social power to carry out the necessary steps. Alternatively, it assumes that every powerful actor in society is motivated to do whatever it is that we, all of us together, should. Either way, the animating presupposition of much left-wing theorizing is normally false, and certainly false when the question is whether “we” should implement a genuinely liberating basic income.
It is not the case that, by legislating a generous basic income, “we” could empower the most exploited workers among us better to resist their capitalist bosses. On the contrary, we shall argue in this essay that the familiar story about the emancipatory potential of a generous basic income has got things almost exactly backwards. A basic income high enough to be genuinely liberating for the low-wage worker would require enormous expropriation of businesses and wealthy people. Consequently, there is no chance of its passage until there is a working class with the social and organizational power already adequate to extract it. The means to the requisite political organization, moreover, must come through labor organizing and left-wing political leadership, and not through elite-driven “entitlement reform,” precisely because only an organized working class will be able to hold elites to account and control the fate of their social policy proposals in our plutocratic times. Accordingly, when a livable basic income finally arrives, its function will not be to empower the individual worker against her capitalist bosses, since a livable basic income already presupposes that an organized working class has effective control over the shape and direction of the economy. Instead, the role of a livable basic income, if and when it comes, will be to limit the labor discipline that may be democratically imposed on all, whether by individual employee-owned workplaces or by genuinely majoritarian legislation. In short, if the idea of a liberating basic income is to have a place in an attractive political vision, we should think through not how it will renovate capitalism, but its emancipatory purpose in an already functioning institutional socialism.
[...] recently even billionaires have been paying lip service to the idea that some version of the policy could make existing social spending more efficient, labor markets more flexible, and so on. As we have stressed, however, implementing any version that could plausibly be called liberating for the average worker would require permanent and unprecedented expropriation of businesses and wealthy people. However meticulous the case for a policy that has this consequence, it should be clear that the business class will not willingly agree to expropriate itself.
[...] It demonstrates how deeply entrenched the largest internet companies and their surveillance model is with the profit system. They’re just in the bone marrow of modern capitalism — of our modern political economy. To go after that is basically going after the whole system, in a way. It would require that sort of organizing campaign.
Or to put it in terms of media analysis: no significant economic interests wish to open up critical public examination of the surveillance model of capitalism, so that means none of our political establishment — Republicans or Democrats — has any incentive to go there. Those few journalists who remain have little to work with from the official sources they rely upon, so the matter dies. It is no longer “news.”
on the Cambridge Analytica scandal demonstrating "the extremely close connection between commercial media, politics, and our everyday lives"
Most of the people who designed the internet didn’t want it to be a commercial medium, and that’s why they made it that way. The problem with that for capitalism was that it didn’t make for a very successful commercial model. In the 1990s, there was endless talk of locating the “killer app,” the digital goose that would lay the golden eggs. Capitalists knew the internet was changing everything, but it seemed resistant to commercial exploitation. By the middle of the 1990s, Madison Avenue and the corporate community realized that if they were going to really have the internet be the nervous system of modern society, they had to make it advertiser friendly, they had to make it profit friendly. They had to commercialize it, and the crucial thing to doing that was introducing the capacity and the protocols for surveillance, knowing who exactly is online, everything about them. That began in earnest in the late 1990s and changed the entire logic of the internet — turned it on its head in many respects.
in response to:
at the heart of it all is the commercial principle driving our media system. This is of course what’s left out of the mainstream accounts of it. Could you lay out where you think the connections are between the commercialization of media and the way in which Facebook has now been harnessed to these very
worrying political ends?
[...] here was a technology that conceivably could give corporations infinitely more power over consumers, not simply to advertise products, but to make sales. But that required wrestling away people’s ability to maintain their privacy, and doing so without their awareness of what was being done to them.
This movement was led, appropriately enough, by Procter & Gamble. The key was to find a way of tracking people’s internet activity so you could know who they were, where they were, and you could collect data on them. It didn’t begin all at once. It wasn’t an overnight 180-degree turn, but that process was underway by the mid-nineties, and then it was expanded to where we are today over the next decade.
Why, so early on, was it understood that the key to turning the internet into a commercial medium would be this tracking and surveillance capacity?
explaining that advertisers were ones driving it initially, recognising that no one would choose to view an ad
The great Internet monopolies of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google (Alphabet), and Microsoft are different. They are global firms and do not depend upon government licenses for the market power. At the same time, they have extremely close relations with the US government and much of their work relies upon research and innovations first developed under military auspices. In just two decades, these five firms have conquered capitalism in an unprecedented manner. If you look at the largest companies in America today in terms of market value, the top five companies in the United States and the world in terms of market value are, in no particular order, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook. They’re the top five companies in the world in terms of market value. It’s astonishing what a dominant role they play. They blow everyone out of the water and they are growing at breakneck speed.
I think that ten of the top twenty-four corporations in the US are internet companies, and fifteen of the top forty. The number of internet firms drops off sharply once you get past the top forty. There is not much of a middle class or even upper middle class in digital capitalism.
nothing new, but maybe worth citing
[...] these companies then undertake this very close surveillance, which then becomes available to the highest bidder for commercial purposes.
[...]
[...] alongside this centralization of control there is also the fact that journalism itself is dying. The internet hasn’t caused its death, but it has accelerated it, and eliminated any hope for a successful commercial news media system that can serve the information needs of the entire population.
The roots of its decline stretch back decades. For the first hundred or so years in American history, newspapers were heavily subsidized by the federal government, in order to encourage a rich array of news media. No one at that time thought the profit motive operating in the “free” market alone would be sufficient to provide the caliber of news media the constitution required. This was done primarily through free or nominal distribution of newspapers by the post office — almost all newspapers were distributed by post in the early republic — and also by printing contracts handed out with the explicit intent to help support different newspapers, by branches of government. In combination, the annual government subsidy of journalism as a percentage of GDP in the 1840s would be worth around $35 billion in today’s economy.
By the late nineteenth century, the commercial system consolidated whereby advertising provided the lion’s share of the revenues, and the state subsidies declined in importance and, in many cases, disappeared. Publishing newspapers, building journalism empires, began to generate massive fortunes while continuing to provide owners with immense political power. This is the context in which professional journalism — purportedly nonpartisan, opinion-free, politically neutral and fact-obsessed — was spawned in the first few decades of the twentieth century.
[...]
The basic problem is that the giant internet companies — especially Facebook and Google — are taking away the advertising money that would’ve traditionally gone to some newspaper or journalism-producing entity. But Facebook and Google aren’t using this money to invest in more journalists or news reporting.
[...]
This looked like the transition, say, in the year 2000, that we would slowly be seeing. It wasn’t clear we would lose commercial journalism. But what happened with the surveillance model is that no one buys ads on a website. You don’t go to the New York Times and say, “Hey, I want to buy an ad,” and hope and pray my target audience comes and looks at your website and sees my ad. Instead, you go to Google or Facebook or aol , and you say, “Hey, I want to reach every American male in this income group between the age of 30 and 34 who might be interested in buying a new car in the next three months,” and aol will locate every one of those men, wherever they are online, and your ad will appear on whatever website they go to, usually straight away. They will find them.
That means the content producers, in this case the news media, don’t get a cut anymore. Those advertising dollars used to subsidize most of their work. Now, if they do get an ad on your site, they get much less for it, and they only get it for those users who are in the target audience of the person placing the ad, not everyone who goes to their site. If you and I were to go to the same site, we’d get different ads, probably, working for different products. The amount of money that the actual website gets is infinitesimal compared to what it would be if they got the whole amount, like in the good old days.
The commercial model’s gone, which is why journalism’s dying, why there are very few working journalists left. No rational capitalist is investing in journalism because of its profit potential. To the extent they invest, it tends usually be some hedge-fund douchebags buying dying media and stripping them for parts, or some billionaire like Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post or Sheldon Adelson buying the Las Vegas Review-Journal, always at fire-sale prices. The point of the exercise in these instances is to use the newspaper to shape the broader political narrative to the owner’s liking, with very few other voices in opposition. That is hardly a promising development for an open society.
in response to
What that means is that what started out as a radically decentralized
and almost impossible to monitor form of communication, within a few
short years, became incredibly centralized, where all the information
was passing through just a very small number of hands.
and
What does this do to the original two ambitions of the scientific community behind the internet, anonymity and better dissemination of information?