Day: March 18, 2019

And Now For Something Completely Different: A Little Fiction.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

Owen Bishop waited at the bus stop. He had arrived here after a long and twisted trip through various obscure parts of the Midwest and later, the states of New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. He hitchhiked every where. On his last leg, the reefer transport truck driven by Ralph Swinden had picked him up in New Jersey and now dropped him off at this bus stop close to the Newport Bridge. Ralph would go on to meet a ship in Portland, Maine to pick up a load of fish to unload in Chicago. But first, he had to unload cabbage in Middletown.  

“Have a nice day, Owen,” shouted Ralph as Owen dropped to the ground from the passenger seat of the truck. 

“Do you think Auschwitz was intelligent?” Channeling Kurt Vonnegut he yelled this at Ralph as the truck pulled away. They had been having an increasingly acrimonious conversation as they went along about how intelligent the human species really was. Owen argued that we were stupid as anything and that cats and dogs were smarter than us. Ralph was a strong believer in the superior intelligence of man. (Ralph never used the term ‘human species’, he always used ‘man’. Ralph was like that.) Owen was getting more and more exasperated with Ralph having called him a silly man earlier on the trip. Ralph actually didn’t deserve that. He just wasn’t too bright. 

Owen was tired and hungry but compelled to be here. He had no idea why. The reason would be news to him. He glanced furtively at the sky. The bus he was to catch was late.  He hated waiting for a bus, especially when the stakes were so high. Right! Now he remembered! He needed to get to Newport now!

It turns out he needed to catch a spaceship to Mars and it was taking off from a secret base in Newport and it wouldn’t wait for him. But he didn’t know that just yet.

Well, truth be told, none of the above has any basis in reality. Owen was not at a bus stop somewhere near Newport, Rhode Island. He had not been in Ralph Swinden’s transport truck, and he was not waiting for a spaceship to Mars to pick him up. But that’s just me saying that.

Actually, he was in a basement suite in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, somewhere in the neighbourhood of Main Street and 30thAvenue. He would, of course, end up on Mars, but that’s a whole other story. That’s coming up. 

But first, some bitter truth about me. I am Owen Bishop’s brother and chronically bitter. I am (and was) supposed to look after him after our parents both died in a plane crash a few years ago while on their way to Puerto Vallarta for a “much needed vacation”. They hated each other so I could never figure out why they would want to vacation together, probably because taunting each other was so much fun. 

I can distinctly remember my mother saying to me: “Now, you know you have to look after Owen. You’re the strong one. Owen is twelve years old now but as you know he can barely tie his shoelaces before breaking down in sobs.” She said: “We are sort of fond of you son, but don’t let us down or we will quickly cease being fond of you. Get it? We need to be able to count on you to look after Owen if we are ever to relax!” 

Well, I let them down. Of course, with them being dead, that meant diddly-squat. It would have meant diddley-squat in any case. 

Owen went completely nuts when he was told by the police officer who came to our door on the evening of June 14th, 1994 to tell us our parents were dead. He never recovered. I expect he blamed himself for their deaths. My mother would have found a way to blame me. She was crazy like that. I felt nothing but relief at the news of the demise of our parents. Such a relief! 

I never did like Owen but I felt sorry for him in a way. He never did figure out that our parents were total nut jobs, completely insane. I figured that out early on. They started working on me when I was just a baby. They did the same to Owen but he never figured it out. 

This is how my parents worked: I’d be sitting in the living room on the couch reading a book. My mother who always sat in an overstuffed chair in front of the TV just finishing up her fourth glass of scotch. She’d say to me: “Come here kid. Take my glass into the kitchen and get your father to fill it up for me will ya.” So, I would. I’d take the glass into the kitchen and tell my father who was also finishing up his fourth glass of scotch that my mother wanted a refill.  He always sat at the table watching a small TV which sat on a shelf close to the fridge. My father and mother never watched TV in the same room. 

I’d bring him my mother’s empty scotch glass and tell him that she asked that he fill it. Well, there was no way he would ever do that. She knew that and I knew that. So, as predictably as ever, he told me to get lost. On that cue, I’d go back to the living room to report back to my mother. 

She’s be waiting for me, ready. She’d tell me something like this: “I never told you to bring my glass into the kitchen to your loser of a father to fill. Bring me the goddamn bottle of scotch!” So, I’d go back into the kitchen where they kept the scotch in a cupboard across from the fridge so it would be handy when it was time to put ice in it. 

I’d reach for the bottle and my father would yell at me: “DON’T YOU TOUCH THAT BOTTLE! If your mother wants a drink she can come get it herself.” So, I’d go back into the living room and tell my mother what my father had said, but she already knew what he had said because she could hear everything that was said in the kitchen from the living room. 

“I never told you to get me that bottle. Are you crazy? I’ll get the damn thing myself!”

So, she’d get up, stagger into the kitchen, find something handy to throw at my father, get the scotch and stagger back into the living room. My father always had at least six bottles of scotch stashed here and there in the house along with the one in the cupboard across from the fridge. He hated my mother but he did appreciate her taste in whisky. He would have fought my mother tooth and nail if he had thought for one minute that the bottle she was taking into the living room was the last one in the house. 

I figured out soon enough that my mother and father were both completely nuts. I never argued with them. That would have been pointless. I shrugged my shoulders a lot and ducked when they got close to me to avoid a backhand to the head. 

Owen on the other hand argued with them, cried, pounded the floor with his fists and eventually refused to leave his room. Poor Owen. He never got it. Out of body experiences were how Owen lived most of his life with my parents. He told me that when he was ten years old. I can’t really blame him for withdrawing like that after what he went through as a little kid. It was tough to get him grounded though. Really tough. 

Vancouver is a nice city. Owen and I first came here as patients at the Hollyhock Hospital in New Westminster, another city close to Vancouver on the north shore of the Fraser River. The Hollyhock Hospital specialized in treating people with addictions and mental illnesses using LSD among other drugs. It’s been closed for some time now. We both stayed there for about six months until our money ran out. I can’t say that either one of us improved much because of our stay at the hospital but we did realize that Canada was a pretty good place to live and we loved the Westcoast. We’ve lived in Vancouver now for twenty years. We live in a clean, spacious two bedroom basement suite in a nice house next to a church. The rent is reasonable. Nobody bothers us. It’s all very civilized. I say we’velived in Vancouver for twenty years, but I really mean me. Owen is alive alright and he’s here in body, but he’s mostly catatonic now and spends most of his time in astral travelling. At least that’s what he calls it. He has rare moments of semi-lucidity during which we can talk about these things. I don’t like him much, but he’s all I’ve got. 


The Space Merchants: The Prescient Misters Pohl and Kornbluth*

~ Roger JG Albert

I love strange books with compelling titles and The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth fits the bill.  This book, first published in 1952 but with the seventh and last printing taking place in 1972, was printed in the U.S.A.  It’s based sometime in the future and looking back to it’s publication in 1952 from a 2012 vantage point is a bit  strange.  Pohl and Kornbluth obviously had to design a future that was credible to a 1952 readership still infused with memories of World War II and trying to deny the existence of the Korean War.  In some ways, that’s not too difficult a task, but in other ways the challenge is daunting.  For instance, the characters in the book still use phones like in 1952, board planes on the tarmack at airports and smoke incessantly, but space travel is common.  The book is about the marketing business and how it has evolved.  Lies are common and the bigger the lie the better.  Products are not simply advertized anymore.  Marketing businesses create products to sell not based on their utility but on their salability.  (How far is THIS from our current reality?) They are trying to sell people on Venus colonization.  How can they make Venus attractive to potential colonists?  It’s virtually uninhabitable.  I leave it to you to find a copy of the book to see how the main character in the book, Mitchell Courtenay, gets along.  What I want to highlight here is a simple paragraph on page 7 of my edition of the book which reads:

“Fowler Schocken inclined his head.  ‘Thank you, Matthew,’ And he meant it.  It took him a moment before he could go on.  ‘We all know,’ he said, ‘what put us where we are.  We remember the Starrzalius Verily account, and how we put Indiastries on the map.  The first spherical trust.  Merging a whole subcontinent into a single manufacturing complex.  Schocken Associates pioneered on both of them.  Nobody can say we were floating with  the tide.  But that’s behind us.”

Indiastries [my emphasis].  ‘Now that’s prescient,’ I thought to myself.  Pohl and Kornbluth project into the future a trend that was in its infancy in 1952 with post-war globalization and geopolitics, that is, the corporate drive to find cheaper raw materials and labour wherever they might be.  Of course, that’s a movement or trend that started long before epitomized by Christopher Columbus and his P3 venture, but did it ever take off after WW II.  Now, global business corporations scour the globe like bottom feeders, looking for the cheapest raw materials and the cheapest labour.  In the case of raw materials, its a little more difficult than with labour.  Raw materials are found where they lie in the earth.  It’s possible for hard rock mining companies, oil producers and other exploiters of the earth’s ‘natural resources’ to more to parts of the earth previously unexplored to uncover precious commodities like gold.  Canadian mining corporations are all over Mexico, Central and South America mining and exploring for minerals.  That doesn’t mean Canada has no gold left in ‘them thar’ hills, but the ‘business climate’ is much better in Mexico and the near absence of environmental regulation (or their enforcement) is just fine, thank you.  And labour is cheap, cheap, cheap. For secondary or value added manufacturers and businesses operating in the service sector, the ‘Third World’ is their oyster.  They’ve managed to cut deals with impoverished governments all over the world to set up export processing zones (EPZs) which are sometimes secured compounds, sometimes entire cities or regions, where powerful global corporations can set up shop, exploit cheap labour, pay no duties, no taxes, and face no environmental or health and safety regulations.  Corporations have flocked to the EPZs.  ‘Our’ corporations are abandoning North American, Japanese, European, Australian and South Korean labour and moving production to EPZs or other facilities in the ‘Third World’ at an exponential rate.  There is no turning this around.  China and India are big players in providing cheap labour for ‘our’ corporations making it hard to pick up any ‘consumer’ product these days that’s not manufactured there.  But make no mistake about it.  Those products are not Chinese or Indian products.  They are Nike, Apple, Dell, Monsanto, Nestlé, Wal-Mart, etc., etc, products produced by cheap labour in poor countries bypassing ‘expensive’ labour ‘here.’

So, Indiastries.  Looks like it’s well on the ways to reality. India harnessed as a whole by a single manufacturing trust. With how rapidly things are changing these days, how far down the road can that be? Pohl and Kornbluth were pretty prescient guys. Only problem I find with their scenario is who’s going to buy all these wonderful products made in India and elsewhere in the ‘Third World?’  Won’t be workers here because they’re putting us out of work as fast as they can.  We’ll see how it goes.

  • This is a re-blog of a post I wrote in 2012. I think it’s quite relevant following my last post.

A Pointed Stick or a Backhoe: Take Your Pick.

~ Roger JG Albert

Suppose you need a trench dug. It needs to be 50 centimetres deep, 120 centimetres wide and 30 metres long. You’ve never had to undertake such a project before. You have a choice of tools: pointed stick, shovel or back hoe. It would take you no time to learn how to use the pointed stick, a small amount of time to learn how to dig with a shovel, but learning how to use the backhoe would take you a substantial amount of time. What would you choose to do?

Now, think about this. You have a choice. You can mobilize 1000 people to dig your trench, 100 people to dig it with a shovel or 1 person to do it with a backhoe. All three of these options would take exactly the same amount of time. What would you choose to do? 

I know what I would do in this situation. I’d hire the guy with the backhoe. I wouldn’t for a minute contemplate hiring 1000 people with pointed sticks to dig my trench. That’s because it’s realistic for me to make this decision in the time and place in which I live. Obviously, if I lived 30,000 years ago, I would not have the option of using a backhoe. A pointed stick would be my only option and I would easily be able to mobilize all the help I need among my tribal members. 

It seems like a no-brainer to think that history has been a steady progress towards more and more sophisticated technology: pointed sticks to shovels to backhoes. However, not everything is what it seems. Let’s see what this situation looks like for someone starting from scratch. Let’s make the scenario really simple. Let’s have you dig a trench 3 metres long, 30 centimetres deep and 20 centimetres in width. 

The pointed stick is indeed a very simple tool and can be gotten with very little effort, sometimes by just picking one up off of the ground under a tree. Simple tools like this allow a person to get right down to work.  A little sharpening with a sharp rock might help if an already pointed stick couldn’t just be found, and some hardening over a fire could make the tool more durable. 

The shovel is a whole other thing. To make a shovel, even a fairly basic one, requires some wood and shaped metal, preferably a hard metal. So, while the person with the pointed stick is hard at work digging the trench, the person who has chosen to dig the trench with a shovel is looking around for a suitable piece of wood for the handle. That shouldn’t be difficult, although the wood may need some shaping. But then finding a suitable metal by mining will be more challenging. Extracting the metal from the ore by smelting then forging the metal and shaping it before fitting it on the handle will complete the project. Chances are pretty good too that more than one person will be involved in the making of a shove. There may be a specialist wood worker, a miner, a smelter and a blacksmith. By the time the shovel is ready for work, the pointed stick wielding worker may well have finished digging his trench. 

The backhoe is hopeless if the challenge is to start from scratch. The guy with the pointed stick would have already cut half a million trenches in the time it would take a person, or even an army of people, to build a backhoe from scratch. 

The Social Character of Human Production

What this all means is that human labour must always be assessed in its social context. All of the tools mentioned above have a certain amount of labour in their making. The sum total of the time it takes to dig a trench with a pointed stick, a shovel or a backhoe is only part of the story. The time it takes to fashion said tools must also be taken into account when calculating the time it takes to make something or accomplish a particular task. The labour embedded in the tool prior to when the digging actually starts is called crystallized labour or dead labour because it’s no longer active, having already played its part in creating the necessary tools to do the job. There is very little crystallized labour in a pointed stick, a lot more in a shovel, and a massive amount more in a backhoe. So, which tool is the most efficient? It depends on the social conditions under which the task is undertaken. 

The reality is that the more sophisticated the tool, the more crystallized labour contained in it. In the case of the backhoe, there are centuries of accumulated knowledge, techniques of raw material acquisition, processing, shaping and assembly probably including thousands of workers in many parts of the globe over many, many years. It also includes the work performed in the petrochemical industries that bring the machine alive so it can perform its duties. The pointed stick and the shovel have no need for extraneous inputs in their operation. Of course, once a backhoe exists it can, with one operator and enough diesel fuel, cut in a month as many trenches as a person with a pointed could cut in a lifetime.[1]

The crystallized labour included in any tool is part of the necessary capital required to produce anything. The tools themselves are capital. Another thing: the amount of capital necessary to produce the backhoe is social capital. It’s taken masses of people centuries to come up with the backhoe. It’s not the work of any single individual. A major aspect of this process is that pooled capital is subject to appropriation by people who organize the productive process but who don’t actually produce anything themselves as individuals. A backhoe is a product of the accumulation of capital and its control by a small minority of the population. So, historically what has happened is that the productive forces, particularly the tools and knowledge needed to make things happen have been increasingly socialized then privately appropriated. That’s history, folks. But what exactly does appropriation mean? 

Capitalist Appropriation

Appropriation means that ownership of the means of production has historically been privatized or concentrated in the hands of a few individuals as soon as there appeared the need for a division of labour or specialization in the productive process. The objective of appropriation early on was to remove control over the process from the people who actually used the tools and did the work. Frederick Winslow Taylor, in the early 20thCentury, created scientific management[2], a process whereby specialized workers, craftsmen, were removed as active agents in the factory to be replaced by managers who broke down the productive process into its constituent parts assigning workers, now disenfranchised, to accomplish just one task along an assembly line. Workers no longer individually created products but contributed only to one task in the process of the creation of a product. The quintessential expression of scientific management early on was implemented by Henry Ford in his assembly-line production of automobiles.

Workers were not too pleased about having their control over the productive process wretched from their large calloused hands so the early 20thCentury featured some of the most active labour protests and strikes in history. Needless to say, the process by which control over production shifted from workers to owners and managers started much earlier than in the 20thCentury as did labour strife. Regardless, the 20thCentury has proven to be THE century of capital’s monopolization of the productive process. In doing so, it has broken down the production of commodities[3]into specialized activities and has globalized the process, a situation made possible by shipping containers, cheap air transport, the internet, just-in-time production tied to supply chains, and the vassalization of countries.[4]It’s clear that the few individuals and the organizations they represent who control global wealth are finding it increasingly difficult to find effective investments. The reasons are simple in conception but complex when aggregate global capitalist activity is considered. 

A Shrinking Rate of Profit

As Marx noted, the only way a capitalist can make a profit through surplus value is by not paying his workers full value for their labour. In fact, profit is essentially the appropriation of unpaid wages. Veblen contested this Marxian notion in his The Place of Science in Modern Civilizationbecause, as he argued, who says workers deserve the right to the full value of their labour. Nevertheless, it’s still true that for many millennia human production has predominantly been a social affair so why shouldn’t we all share equally in what we produce? Well, we could and we might still, but we haven’t to date except for the odd ‘primitive’ situation millennia ago or in more and more marginalized indigenous tribal situations today. 

So, as we carry on today with increasing automation, computerization, AI, and technological innovation, the margins of profit continue to shrink because the more capital or dead labour is used in the productive process, the less room there is to extract surplus value from the process and make a profit. If, for example, Macdonald’s were to successfully replace all of its workforce with robots, it would find it more and more difficult to make a profit by paying its workforce less than the value that it produces. And, of course, robots don’t buy hamburgers, don’t pay taxes. The value of labour embodied in them as capital will allow for some profit to be extracted from the business of making hamburgers, but that basis for the creation of profit will quickly dry up. As the graph below shows, the amount of capital expended in the productive process is increasing historically while the share of labour in the process is steadily decreasing and/or devalued. Where we are along this process is anyone’s guess but I’m certain that we’re well past the midpoint and probably closing in on the far right side of the graph. 

So, as workers we have been systematically excluded from ownership and control over the productive process. Still, Marx found reason to be optimistic about the future. That’s the subject of my next post. 

Figure: Labour and Capital in Human History

[1]These estimates are completely arbitrary of course but are included to approximate the variation in values that are obvious in the scenario introduced.

[2]http://historytransformationofdesign.weebly.com/uploads/1/1/7/2/11722228/taylorism_and_fordism.pdf

[3]https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/commodity.asp

[4]Vassalization: My word for the process by which the finance capitalist global oligarchy has come to treat countries. Certainly, since the 1970s but as a process going back to at least Bretton Woods, finance capital has turned countries or nation-states into vassals. From this perspective, countries are no longer sovereign or democratic, but instead are subordinate managers of the working class and guarantors of private property and private accumulation of capital.