Month: October 2017

Why Average Incomes Tell Us Nothing About Real World Inequality

~ Roger JG Albert

When the experts tell us that average incomes have risen, what does that actually tell us? Not much that’s useful in understanding real world politics and the inequities of economic life. I know that most of us understand averages, now don’t we? What’s there to explain? Well, let’s have a look at average incomes.

Incomes can be looked at using three measures of central tendency: the mean (the average), the median and the mode. For a technical explanation of these terms see: https://statistics.laerd.com/statistical-guides/measures-central-tendency-mean-mode-median.php.

Each of these measures has its advantages and disadvantages.  If we take a population and want to figure out their average height, it’s simple: measure each individual in the population, add the heights of all of them together and divide by the number of individuals measured. It’s unlikely that all people in a population would be of the same stature, and it doesn’t tell us anything about the range of heights. It’s always good to know what the range is otherwise there’s no way of judging just how variable the heights are in a population. Same goes for incomes. Scenario A below is of a fictitious population of income earners that each earns $100 thousand dollars each per year. That makes the total incomes earned by the group $1 million dollars and the average is $100 thousand. If you know where such a world exists, please let me know.

Scenario A  
Income Earner Income $ % of total income
Income earner 1 100,000 10
Income earner 2 100,000 10
Income earner 3 100,000 10
Income earner 4 100,000 10
Income earner 5 100,000 10
Income earner 6 100,000 10
Income earner 7 100,000 10
Income earner 8 100,000 10
Income earner 9 100,000 10
Income earner 10 100,000 10
Total Income 1,000,000 100
Average Income 100,000  

Now, let’s consider Scenario B below. The total income of all ten earners is still $1 million and the average is still $100 thousand. What’s changed? The distribution. In this scenario, the highest income earner brought in $200 thousand while the lowest earner brought in $45 thousand. That’s a significant difference and means that there is substantial income inequality but if a government wanted to obfuscate rather than clarify the issue, it might want to argue that average incomes haven’t changed. What are you worried about?

Scenario B  
Income Earner Income $ % of total income
Income earner 1 200,000 20.00
Income earner 2 150,000 15.00
Income earner 3 130,000 13.00
Income earner 4 100,000 10.00
Income earner 5 95,000 9.50
Income earner 6 85,000 8.50
Income earner 7 75,000 7.50
Income earner 8 65,000 6.50
Income earner 9 55,000 5.50
Income earner 10 45,000 4.50
Total Income 1,000,000 100.00
Average Income 100,000  

Now, consider this third scenario. The total incomes are still $1 million, the average is still $100 thousand. However, in this scenario, the highest income earner is taking in 72.7 of the total income. This scenario pushes income inequality to a much greater degree.

Scenario C  
Income Earner Income $ % of total income
Income earner 1 726,990 72.70
Income earner 2 85,000 8.50
Income earner 3 45,000 4.50
Income earner 4 20,430 2.04
Income earner 5 20,430 2.04
Income earner 6 20,430 2.04
Income earner 7 20,430 2.04
Income earner 8 20,430 2.04
Income earner 9 20,430 2.04
Income earner 10 20,430 2.04
Total Income 1,000,000 100.00
Average Income 100,000  

Now, think of a situation where aggregate incomes rise, but the lowest earners retain their share of earnings at 2.04 percent. Now the government can say: What are you worried about? Your income hasn’t changed at all and the country is getting richer. Silly you. Maybe you should just work a little harder.

Calculating median income isn’t much more helpful. The median income is the point where half the incomes are above and half below. That will tell us if a population distribution is changing in broad terms, but the median income in scenario C is $20,430.00. What does that tell you about the distribution of incomes in this population.

Calculating the modal income is interesting. The modal income is the one that appears most often in a distribution. In scenario C, the modal income is clearly $20,430.00. That’s the income most people make. It still doesn’t shed much light on the inequality in a distribution.

So, we always need more than a measure of central tendency to tell us what’s really going on in the world in terms of income inequality. If the government, or the head of the Bank of Canada for example, tells you that average incomes are rising, know that you’re not being told the whole story.

If you’re not concerned about these things, never mind.

Note: this post was inspired by a section of Robert Sapolsky’s book: Why Zebras don’t get ulcers.

 

Growing grapes on the Beaufort Range.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 1 Comment

I live on one of the main roads that lead out of Cumberland, BC. Cumberland is on the eastern slopes of the Beaufort Range at about a 500 foot altitude. Over the past few weeks we have witnessed at least a dozen logging trucks headed out of town every week day down the Trent River Main headed who knows where. That’s been going on for years but it seems logging activity is picking up around here. Certainly, the clearcuts are getting bigger and bigger just up the slopes from our little community and they’re getting more numerous.

I don’t know much about what sustains a forest. I’m a sociologist, not a biologist nor an ecologist. What the ecologists tell me, however, is frightening. Logging and development are wreaking havoc with ecosystems and changing the landscape in very visible ways. I’m of two minds about that. Should we care?

But let me step back for a moment and ask a few questions some of you may have answers to.

  1. Given climate change and the report yesterday that increasing temperatures are accelerating, has anyone given thought to how a changing global climate will impact our forest and marshland ecosystems on Vancouver Island?
  2. Is there a tipping point where the amount of logging in any specific area will permanently change the local climate so that certain species of trees cannot grow here any longer?
  3. In the foreseeable future are we looking at the conditions ideal for growing grapes on the hillsides above Cumberland? Are we looking at a potential wine growing situation here?

I know that logging in the Comox Valley and in most areas on the eastern slopes of Vancouver Island mountain ranges is proceeding apace. I’m not at all against logging per se. After all, I’m a woodworker and sculptor in wood. We also still burn wood on occasion in our wood stove. I do, however, question the logic of the kind of clearcut logging we’re witnessing here. There are many ways that forests can serve the economic interests of communities and I’m not at all sure that what’s happening here at the moment is in our best interests. There are alternatives, but I doubt that they are given serious consideration.

Given that the mountain sides above us are all privately owned by logging companies who are themselves largely owned by pension funds, the current model is unlikely to change. Making pots of money is the name of the game and quarterly profits must increase or shareholders may look to invest their money elsewhere. I’m not sure pension managers know anything about logging or forestry, but they do know how to push for increased revenues. So, forestry managers must deliver the goods or risk losing their stake in the venture.

In some ways I grieve the loss of the wonderful forests that surround us, but I also realize that the land hereabouts was pretty much clearcut a hundred years ago to resemble a barren landscape. We live in second and third growth tree plantations, not forests. I’m quite shocked at the size of much of the timber I see leaving on the trucks by my home. I can’t image many of the logs on those trucks would be of much use except to make pulp or chips for strandboard, nor can I image you’d get as much as a 2X4 out of some of them.

That said, maybe I need to chill out and accept what’s happening. After all, I enjoy a nice Chardonnay. Maybe, soon enough, we’ll be a world class wine growing area with a balmy climate while California becomes a desert once again. Maybe we’ll have vineyards as far as the eye can see. Cheers! Maybe we can grow hops too!

 

 

Bank of Canada’s Poloz might be spooked by an unnatural economy: Don Pittis – Business – CBC News

~ Roger JG Albert

Many Canadians with high debt loads fear the potential impact of interest rate hikes. Given some strange factors in the economy, it’s difficult to predict when the next hike might come.

Source: Bank of Canada’s Poloz might be spooked by an unnatural economy: Don Pittis – Business – CBC News

This is a pretty bizarre story. Pettis reports that Stephen Poloz, the Bank of Canada chief, says his usual models for figuring out what’s going on in the Canadian economy aren’t doing the job anymore. The economy, he argues, is behaving strangely.

Well, I don’t think ‘the economy’ is behaving strangely at all. In fact there is no such thing as the self-contained ‘Canadian Economy’ any more that there is such a thing as exclusive Canadian weather. The problem Poloz is having is that his models have never worked and will not work in the future either. His models are based on the country, Canada, as the basic unit of analysis when in fact, global finance capital should be considered the basic unit of analysis.

Not all of them, but most countries are beholden to global finance capital. Veblen would call politicians and the likes of Stephen Poloz “Guardians of the Vested Interests”. There is very little left of national sovereignty. Harold Innis argued in the late 1940s that Canada only had sovereignty for about 6 months in 1926 when the British and American empires were almost equally influential north of the 49th parallel. Since then it’s been downhill.

More important, the shift to globally based production makes a mockery out of the notion of ‘Canadian’ manufacturing.  Corporations based in the West have transformed Chinese society (and many others in the so-called Third World)  by moving most of their productive capacity there. The Chinese have gotten jobs, certainly, but also killer pollution. We, in fact, have exported jobs and pollution. We should be proud of ourselves. Of course, it could be no other way and we, as ordinary citizens, are not to blame. It’s almost impossible to figure out what’s really going on out there but we get the odd hint now and again from the mainstream media, although they are focussed on scandal and misbehaviour like tax evasion rather than on the real story.

The course of history is pretty much fixed: globalization has been in the works for centuries and will end with the complete integration of the globe’s economic power. It’s getting to the point where national governments are becoming a major fetter to the process of the expansion of finance capital and will be soon in a position where they won’t even be able to pretend that they have any control over their own economic lives. Their currencies are objects of speculation with traders making billions guessing on which currency will go up relative to others. Their ‘trading’ relations are increasingly governed by international bodies like the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and other multinational agreements. One example of how silly the situation: when General Motors moves a  car from Brampton, Ontario to some place in Michigan, the economists call that international trade. Who’s leading who around by the nose here?

Of course Canada has stagnant wages and low inflation. There is a growing divide between labour’s productive capacity, including knowledge and training, and the needs of business and industry. Labour is not ready for the new global economy and, frankly, governments don’t give a shit because if corporations need cheap labour they know where to find it, and it won’t be in Canada. Jobs in Canada are increasingly precarious, often short term, without benefits and job security. There are a few people driving around in Mercedes’ and BMWs, but most people are sucking air driving their Toyotas they bought on credit over 7 years, and just hanging in there hoping things don’t change too radically, too quickly.

People are strung out on personal debt. Yet Poloz says the economy is doing just great. Poloz and his counterparts all over the world need new economic models, ones that are global is scope and focussed on capital accumulation and concentration if they want to understand anything about what’s going on. Statistics Canada, like all national statistical agencies, is seriously behind the times too, collecting national statistics. A long time ago Harold Innis told a gathering of his colleagues that it was about time that they (e.g., social scientists, economists, political economists, and historians as well as the statisticians at Stats Can) ceased allowing national governments to lead them around by the nose. I’m not holding my breath waiting for this to happen. There are some good international agencies collecting statistics, but unfortunately they have to rely on national agencies like Stats Canada. We need a real, global agency that can follow the bouncing buck wherever it leads.

So Poloz should go trick or treating. A big bag of Nestlé’s chocolates might tell him more about what’s going on than his outdated models of how the world works.

Of course, the situation is not as simple as I’ve laid it out here. The complexity of the global economy has got to challenge the best computer modelling software that exists.This is just a teaser. I haven’t even mentioned export processing zones. Fortunately, there are scholars out there trying to figure things out. Bill Carroll at UVic is one of them. He’s working on corporate supply chains. We need more Bill Carrolls. Enough for now.

 

Which is better, Up or Down? North or South? Left or right?

~ Roger JG Albert

Which is better, up or down? North or south? Left or right?

Well, technically, up and down are just words. Most of us think of them as neutral words that simply indicate orientation in space. They are that, but they also contain a political and moral side that is undeniable.

Left and right. Are they just words that indicate a direction from a fixed point in space but they also carry a load of political and moral baggage.

The reality is that left and right are not just neutral words that simply indicate direction. They are packed with poIitical and moral referents. In politics, we refer to socialist, communist and anarchist parties, movements and ideas as those occupying the left-wing of the political spectrum. We identify liberal and conservative ideas, parties and movements as more or less right-wing unless of course you’re a con troll. For con trolls (conservative internet trolls) everything on the left side of Ayn Rand is evil. This is all highly significant because of the qualities we normally attach to the words left and right without really thinking about it. Right is good, left is bad.

Right and correct are often used as synonyms. We use them interchangeably. So, what can we make of that? Right-wing parties are correct parties? It would seem so. At least that’s what the use of right in this context implies. Who sits at the right hand of God? Why, Jesus, of course, although sheep do too, apparently. Thomas Aquinus was quite concerned about the significance and the symbolism of right and left with reference to God. For some reason I remember the angel Gabriel as sitting on the right of God and Lucifer, before he was cast into hell, on the left. Was Lucifer the first leftist? [1] It makes sense, especially when you consider how the political right sees itself as truly moral and correct.

 

North and south are great examples of how words that are supposed to simply refer to navigational directions on earth, have become politically charged. The North is good, don’t you know. It’s cool, collected, upright, hard-working, morally impeccable and just as pure as the driven snow. The South, by contrast, is hot, lazy, unpredictable and morally suspect leaning towards nudity and hedonism. So, where do northerners go to vacation and let their hair down? Why, to the hedonistic south, of course. And, if you look at any regular map of the globe, north is always on the top. Strange, but when I see photographs of planet earth taken from space, I don’t see those distinctions.

I’m left-handed and us lefties, aside from being called sinistral, are often referred to as southpaws. The implications of this use of language is clear: left-handers are somehow morally suspect.

So, north is up and south is down. Go figure. Up and down are two other words that were initially intended to simply indicate direction, but have been recruited for political purposes over the years. Who knows exactly how that happens, how these language uses evolve, but they do, and they serve political[2] ends. We see them as being natural, neutral and anything but controversial, but they have their nasty side. If I’m feeling particularly chipper one day, I’m said to be ‘up.’ If I’m a little depressed because I just lost my job, I’m thought of as being ‘down’. “What’s wrong, why are you looking so down today?” Sheesh.

There are many more examples of politically charged words parading as neutral. Just think of east and west, over and under, standing and lying, top and bottom. I’ll let you think of others.

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[1] See: https://www.quora.com/Handedness-Why-was-there-prejudice-against-left-handed-people. Quora is not always a reliable source of information, but in this case, reliable enough.

[2] By political here I mean simply the distribution of power in society in a very broad sense. Politics is everywhere there is imbalance of power and some people have more executive license than others, more privilege, more resources, and, in their minds at least, the moral high ground.

Engineers thwarted by business men.

~ Roger JG Albert

I’ve been rereading Thorstein Veblen. What a character he was. He came from a family of Norwegian immigrants living in Minnesota. He refused to say when he was born but we know he died in California in 1929. He studied at various American universities including Cornell and Yale and settled first at the University of Chicago to teach economics, economic history and related fields in the late 19th century. I’m not writing a biographical note here so if you want more details on the life of this amazingly intelligent but difficult man, just google his name.

The book that secured Veblen’s public notoriety and reputation is The Theory of the Leisure Class. It’s a compendium of commentary on the mores and institutions of the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It’s available free online. Once you become familiar with his unusual use of language, he makes for a very entertaining and enlightening read. His chapters Pecuniary Emulation, Conspicuous Consumption, Conspicuous Leisure, and Dress as an Expression of the Pecuniary Culture are a classic dissection of the institutions that affect us all daily. He lays bare where our wants, needs, desires, and dreams come from. His conclusion is that they come from our ‘pecuniary’ culture. Pecuniary means relating to or consisting of money. For Veblen, our money culture and it’s predominant ruling class of ‘captains of finance’ determine how we see and act in the world. They are the preeminent institutions of our world.*

Now, and finally addressing the title of this post, Veblen was particularly interested in parsing out the various components of the economic institutions that dominate our lives. In his book The Engineers and the Price System, available as a Kindle book, he argues that business men, particularly investment bankers and financiers in general, not your run-of-the-mill corner store operator, farmer, or forestry contractor, are constantly at odds with the engineers that actually run industry. For Veblen and most economists  business and industry are two separate things. We often conflate them today. In our world business dominates industry but it doesn’t have to be that way and, of course, it wasn’t always that way. In feudal Europe, the manorial lord drove industry, not the incipient mercantile class.

Industry, for Veblen, does not mean only the factory system and machine production, it means all the physical activities in which humans engage to produce what they need and want as well as the knowledge needed to do so. He concludes that in our world business finance curtails industrial production (particularly commodity production) as a means of increasing or maintaining profit levels. This is easily observable, but it seems strange to think this is true for some people.

For Veblen, profit making often requires the curtailment of supply. Producing as much and as fast as possible, efficiently and effectively, is the aim of engineering. This imperative constantly goes against the business need to make profit where curtailment of production can ensure prices remain high. These ideas, of course, are not revolutionary, and they are behind Canada’s supply management policies regarding poultry, eggs, milk, doctors, and lawyers.

For a good example of how engineers are thwarted by financial interests, one just has to look at how urban infrastructures are built and maintained. Let’s take Courtenay for example. It’s a smallish city on the east coast of Vancouver island, typical in every way. It has the requisite shopping malls, hospital, schools, service businesses and residential neighbourhoods. Now, the municipal government is made up of elected officials, management staff and workers. The elected officials represent pecuniary interests although they claim to represent all city residents. The management staff includes civil engineers, urban planners and the like. If decisions about where to build streets, what they would look like, the materials used in their construction, etc., were left to the engineers, the city would look entirely different than it does. The monetary interests constantly impose cost restrictions on the engineers with the result that street design, urban planning and related activities, are a hodgepodge of compromise including irritating merge lanes and intersections, inadequate bridge structures and neglected maintenance that leaves many roads a hazard to drive on. However we think about it, engineers are systematically constrained by the vested interests represented by elected officials. Of course, not all elected officials see themselves as representing the vested financial interests, but if they didn’t follow the policies imposed on them by the provincial government with regard to fiscal ‘responsibility’, they would soon be removed from office. And, of course, there must be some oversight of the work of the engineers. The point Veblen makes is that the oversight is the prerogative of business interests in the name of maximizing profit, and not for creating the greatest good for the greatest number of people, in this case, the residents of Courtenay.

By the way, Veblen is off the mark when it comes to the role of engineers in a potential overthrow of the ‘kept classes’, but he wasn’t beyond speculating on the way the pecuniary culture would come to an end. I have to reread his book Imperial Germany to determine what his views are on globalization, but that’s my next Veblen read. Karl Marx was very conscious of globalization and, for him, the end of the capitalist domination of industry and production was predicated on the advanced globalization of capital accumulation. Veblen wrote extensively about Marx and admired his materialist historical method. He did have reservations about Marx’s work, but that will be for another blog post.

 

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For Veblen institution means a ‘crystallized’ habit of thought or life, crystallized meaning that they are spread throughout society so as to be essentially unquestioned by most people.

Don’t buy into the right/left political divide.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 4 Comments

My next blog post will be a follow-up of my last one about what a post-capitalist world would look like. Before I undertake that one, however, I need to get this off my chest.

There’s lately been a move among ‘leftists’ to describe themselves as progressives. That’s all fine and dandy, but the left/right distinction is still in common use. I’ve always thought it stank of conservative righteousness.

We know that right is generally associated with correct. Going back to biblical references there’s the whole right hand of God thing which implies the correct side of God. On the left side of God is nothing good and that’s in fact where we first find Lucifer. It seems that right is always associated with correct and with conservative politics. The left, as we all know, is sinister. The technical term for left-handedness is sinistral. Well, I’m left-handed and that designation, frankly, pisses me off. The left is generally associated with clumsiness, ineptitude and political parties like the social democrats (New Democrats in Canada). I know some of my more conservative friends would think that was just fine, but I think it is a complete distortion of reality and panders to the powers that be.

Moreover, man has long been associated with right and woman with left. Man with the sun, woman with the moon. That should piss women off too.

So, in future blog posts, I will not use a left/right model of political discourse. I suppose they can be useful shorthand terms, but I  think they profoundly prejudice, distort, and colour our thoughts about politics. Enough of that.

 

 

 

What Will a Post-Employment Future Look Like?

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

One of my former students, a frequent commentator on my blog, commented on my last post about my disillusionment and the nature of capital. She asked two questions in particular that I will address in this post:

“Do you see hope for mankind’s survival after workers are replaced by robots and machines and software? If so, do you have an idea of how we humans will be able to sustain ourselves once traditional “jobs” have disappeared?”

These are both good questions. To answer the first one, I’ll say right off that I’m no utopian. I leave the musings about future worlds to the utopians, dystopians, novelists and science fiction writers. There are enough Star Wars and Star Treks to go around. Still, there are some things I can say about the future that are science-based and predictable. However, it’s necessary to first think about what ‘mankind’s survival’ means.

The word survival needs some consideration. Ultimately, none of us, nor any of our marvellous creations survive or ‘live beyond’. Science, especially palaeontology, archaeology and related disciplines, have made it clear that our planet has only been around for a few billion years and we, as a species, have only evolved in that last few million. Us modern humans are a very recent addition to the planet and as with everything else, we’re still evolving and will continue to do so until we go out of existence, and that’s a sure thing. I used to challenge my students to come up with an example of anything that was amenable to perception via our senses that had not or would not come into existence at some point and go out of existence at a later point. Everything comes and goes. Life is a process, not a thing. Of course, I’m sure you can come up with a lot of “what if’s” here as in what if we blow ourselves to bits with nuclear weapons before we get a chance to evolve more or less peacefully out of existence? That may happen. We may try to commit species suicide, but it’s highly unlikely that every human on the planet would be eliminated by nuclear war. I’ll let the dystopians speculate on that one.

Besides, species don’t always disappear completely. They often evolve into other species over long periods of time. So, ultimately, survival is not an option for us, nor is it for any other species. It’s not even  an option for mountain ranges and continents, or the universe, according to some scientists. Nothing ever stays the same. Our limited sensual and perceptual abilities and weak sense of time often prevent us from fully appreciating that.

That said, and moving on, mankind will easily survive the advent of robots and extreme mechanization. I think my student’s question was more in line with the question: “what are we going to do when robots do everything for us?” I really don’t know. Probably some of the things we do now. Work will still need to be done. It is on Star Trek’s Enterprise. (Do you think people get paid on the Enterprise? What would they spend their money on, especially when you can order an Earl Grey tea, hot, at the replicator anytime you want without putting a toonie in a slot?)

Marx actually speculated on a post-capitalist world in one of his books, The German Ideology, but lived to regret it because he was afterwards forever branded a wide-eyed utopian. Later in his life he focussed almost entirely on writing Das Kapital, a basically scientific venture. By then he had abandoned his youthful idealistic philosophizing and political pamphlet writing. But I digress.

What I argued in my last post was that employment would come to an end, not work. I should have made that more clear. Employment is a way work gets organized. Working for wages is only one of many ways work can get organized. Slavery is another way. Work can get done too by volunteers. The point is that employment will disappear but work won’t. To take this one step further: Marx concluded (not specifically in these words) that communism will come when we are all unemployed. Now, that’s not strictly true. Markets existed in ancient Egypt, they just weren’t the dominant means of creating wealth. In the future, if things continue as they are, some employment may still exist, but it won’t be the dominant social relation of production.

The truth is, businesses are rapidly eliminating employees in a number of critical large scale industries. Machines have been eliminating, at an accelerating pace, a lot of the more onerous and dangerous tasks we used to perform as a matter or course. Who would have thunk that lawyering could be automated. It can be and already is to some extent. There are research algorithms that can do away with a lot of the work previously done by junior lawyers and minions in law firms. Lawyers will still be with us for some time, of course, but they don’t have any long term immunity from elimination. Same goes for physicians and surgeons. Very few activities we now take for granted have a guaranteed future. That idea seems impossible at the moment, but could a person living when the Gutenberg press was invented have been able to foresee the use of computerized printing, freeways and skyscrapers?

The point here is that the historical trajectory we are on suggests that capital is replacing labour at a greater pace than ever before in the execution of work. The mechanism by which this occurs is the constantly shrinking margins of profit and the inability of the whole capitalist world (not necessarily individual capitalists) to exploit workers.* In practical terms, if a large scale fast-food chain manages to eliminate most of its workforce, it will have a harder and harder time making money. This is partly because in eliminating its workforce it would also be eliminating a major market for its products. Obviously, there is no direct equivalence between workers and their ability or not to buy hamburgers, but if enough businesses eliminate a significant part of their labour force, there is obviously less and less in the way of aggregate wages to buy commodities. It’s true that fast-food workers could go work elsewhere, but if most other large employers are also doing the same thing, there will soon be nowhere to go. Meet a huge number of American workers. That’s exactly  the situation they’re in. Some may ‘choose’ to become self-employed, but that’s just another way of surreptitiously eliminating employment.

Employment will not be eliminated next week, or next month or next year. Probably not in the next 100 years. But it will be. If that’s true, how will we then sustain ourselves? With no wages, what would we do to buy things? Well, the trick here is to avoid thinking about the future in terms of the present. That’s tough. We have stores full of stuff for us to buy. What would they do? Change drastically, that’s what. Can you imagine a ‘store’ where you walk in, take what you need and leave (legally, that is)? Hoarding? Why would anyone hoard if they can get whatever they need anytime they need it? Besides, we have to ask ourselves why we need all the ‘stuff’ we buy. Do we really need it to be happy, to be fulfilled? As I already noted, we can’t think about a future world by simply imposing our current institutions on it.

Wow, is this a utopia I promised not to get into? I don’t think so. The logical conclusion of the elimination of employment is the elimination of employer/employee relations, wages, salaries and the need for any kind of benefits.  Some countries are already moving toward a guaranteed income for everyone out of the pool of income produced nationally by way of industrial production and business profits. Their education and health services are already paid for by the state.

Earned salaries and wages will no longer exist. Won’t that do away with human initiative? Yes, as we know it. But following the logic of the falling rate of profit to its conclusion suggests a number of consequences we cannot predict at this time. What will people do in a world without employment? Lots of things. Like I said, work will not be eliminated and may be more popular than ever. Most jobs will be eliminated however and, frankly, that looks like a good thing from where I sit right now. Many women who for a long time have not been paid for domestic work might also approve. If they don’t get paid for what they do, then why should the rest of us? Seems fantastical, doesn’t it? Well, it’s no more fantastical than the creation of employment in the first place. Jobs have not always existed, that category of labour was created in Europe starting around the 11th century,  but work has always been necessary because things need to get done. What may come of all of this is a much more equal distribution of the fruits of social production. How that would unfold politically I have no idea except to say that it would have to be a global affair. It may not come peacefully either.

As fodder for a future blog post, one thing I’ve always found fascinating is our love affair with our jobs. Maybe a topic for another post. It’s funny, though, why we seem to crave vacations and get lots of congratulations upon our retirement. Maybe we don’t love our working lives so much after all because we seem happiest when we don’t have working lives or when we ‘vacate’ them.

As a bit of an aside, but a point still relevant to make here, some of us were (in my case as a retiree) and are quite happy with the work we did or do. We were/are the fortunate ones. I loved teaching, but I didn’t particularly love my job. I liked the pay too, of course, but a paycheque is only one way that’s possible to reward a person for doing work. I’ll save this for another blog post too.

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*This statement itself requires much more elaboration, but I’ll save that for another post.

I’m disillusioned.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

I spent my entire adult life studying, thinking about and teaching university courses on history, social relations and  social institutions. I researched how successive historical periods with their own set of class relations came and went. I was particularly interested in the nature of capital and how it relates to labour. I still am, I guess, but I’m not at all convinced that anyone wants to or can share in my knowledge. My scholarly trajectory has been unique. I’ve researched the ideas of a number of historians, political economists, sociologists, psychologists, semanticists, semioticians, philosophers, geologists, cultural geographers and anthropologists of the last two centuries and more. I can’t imagine that very many other people have studied the same constellation of thinkers or who have come to the same conclusions I have about history.

I’m quite active on Facebook, but I’m about to back away from any political discussion on that social medium. There is no way of developing an argument that is cohesive, well-developed and grounded in reality in a Facebook post. The trolls don’t necessarily dominate Facebook, but they often make the Facebook experience distinctly unpleasant. Even well-meaning people who don’t have the background in the social sciences that I have been privileged to acquire can make Facebook frustrating and annoying. This all may sound elitist, and there may be a touch of truth to that observation, but only to the extent that the knowledge I’ve acquired is very difficult to communicate to people who don’t share at least some of the background I have.

Take the concept of capital as an example. I’ve written about capital in the past. This blog has many posts that touch on the concept, if they’re not directly and entirely concerned with it and its relationship with other social institutions such as employment, business and the nation-state.

It’s my observation (I don’t have any scientific information to support this statement) that most people think of capital as money. It’s true that in accounting capital is considered money used to run a business. And because finance capital has become so important in the last 100 years, it’s also become synonymous with capital. Money is a social relationship but is considered a ‘thing’ in the modern mind. Capital, as I see it, and in classical economics, includes money and assets used in the production and reproduction of wealth. Marx, in Capital, distinguishes fixed from variable capital. Variable capital is the investment a capitalist makes in wage-labour. I’ve always considered capital to include labour, an idea that has gotten me in more than one heated discussion with colleagues. For me, if I hire someone to work for me, the work that that person performs is in fact an asset that contributes to my productive goals, and hence should be considered capital. If I’m a slave owner in Rome in 33 AD, my slaves must be considered my capital because they are a vehicle that allows me to accumulate more capital. In essence, for me, capital and labour are the flip sides of the same coin. Labour is always required to produce capital and capital is nothing but crystallized labour, that is, all the labour that was required to produce it. Another example going even further back in history: a bow and arrow, or spear created by a hunter must be considered capital. They embody the labour that it took to create them and they are used to create more wealth, i.e., meat for the family and community table.

Countries, businesses and individuals can have capital. In fact, it’s inconceivable that in this day and age a country or business could operate without capital. Capital assets including money, land, labour, tools (including buildings, machinery, software and that sort of thing) and knowledge, are a prerequisite of large scale industrial production.

Capital does not refer exclusively to assets in a capitalist mode of production. Capital exists whenever and wherever humans create the means to increase their stock of tools, machinery, etc., as a strategy to ensure their material survival. Capital accumulation exists wherever people can produce and stockpile more than enough assets to ensure their immediate survival.

For a number of reasons that are beyond  the scope of this short post to explore, modern capitalist production aims to replace labour as much as possible in the productive process. There is a historical dynamic to capital accumulation that leads inevitably to more and more replacement of labour by capital in the productive process. So, tools, machinery, robots, etc., (with their load of crystallized labour) are constantly in the process of replacing labour. Careful to note that I use ‘labour’ here and not ‘work.’ Work is a unit of measure of the amount of energy required to perform a given task. Labour defines how work is to be conducted. Employment, just to refine the possibilities a little, refers to a particular relationship between labour and capital in the context of a labour market,  where a person’s labour-power (their capacity to work and create wealth) is bought and sold.

Currently, global capital accumulation is the culmination of a process whereby workers are becoming less and less of a factor in production and when they remain part of the productive process are devalued to the point where they are unable to even reproduce themselves. Yes, we are not yet at a critical stage in this process, but the last 3 or 4 decades have clearly shown how corporations have moved commodity production around the planet to areas of cheap labour and lax labour and tax laws. They’ve also replaced workers ‘at home’ with mechanized systems. McDonald’s, as well as other fast food chains, is in the process of replacing front line staff with automated order taking software and hardware processes. Their initiate in this is not unusual and is in fact the goal of most corporations in all fields of production, from agriculture to mining to food and clothing production. Everybody is in on it. There are many consequences of this process and I’ll tackle those in future posts.

Suffice it to say here, that unless one has done a serious study of the dynamics of capital and labour in historical context, how can it be possible to understand one’s relationships to capital? People confuse labour with work with employment. They see these concepts as interchangeable. They’re not. Does that matter to the average person on this planet? Not at all.

Thus, appealing to a person’s rationality is useless on the grand scale of things. It’s not, however, in some immediate and personal ways. It seems the farther we get from daily life, the harder it is to understand the relationships that control us. So appeals to reason might work for some people some of the time, but people generally don’t have the knowledge and information required to apply reason to larger geopolitical events and situations. This may seem elitist, and maybe it is, but I’m not happy about it, no matter what it is. I often feel that my entire life of thought and research has been for naught because I can’t share it in any meaningful way, at least not with the social tools we have at our disposal most of the time, especially the social media.

More to come on Trump, trolls and half-truth.