Capitalism and the ideology of laziness

A few days ago, I had an unpleasant conversation with someone over whether welfare reduces or sustains poverty. Even after showing all the statistics that prove that, the countries with highest welfare spending have some of the least poverty, he still insisted that it created a negative incentive. 

After a while, I asked him flat out whether if he personally got comfortable pay for doing nothing the rest of his life, he would not do anything to which the answer effectively was "yes." He even went further and said that the only reason people acquire skills to do any job, whether it's a lawyer, baker, plumber, mechanic, engineer etc. was to get money; and if they been provided money, people would basically lay on a couch all day for the rest of their lives.

This seems like one the fundamental underlying ideologies of capitalism, that people have to be forced to work through money or else they'll vegetate. It helps explain many of the pathologies of it, from the loathing of welfare to the idolatry of the rich and powerful (at least among themselves) but also performs the important task of making coercion look like necessity, that is, people are forced to work in the current system but that does not mean they have to be.  

The Lack of Work Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism?

First, it is worth looking into this claim empirically. The closet simulation of actually getting "paid to do nothing" was welfare in the US prior to changes in the 1990s. During this time, there were no work requirements and time limits and benefits were actually higher, essentially there was nothing preventing people from simply living on welfare for the indefinite future. According the statistics: the median months on welfare from 1969 to 1996 was about 25 months or slightly over two years. Notice this is not only less than even the lifetime limit of four years, but less than the supposed decades we were led to believe moochers lived on prior to it being "reformed."

Of course there are people who would live off the system and not do anything but overwhelmingly most would not. People are, buy and large, not pathological egotists who need to be coerced to do work, but people with a creative desires that are realized through work. Indeed, the "incentive" comes from this inner drive.

The purpose of the vegetable belief is obvious, since people are, by default, forced to work or die then it the people defending the system have to claim that this is necessary because human beings are necessarily not going to work unless forced. Of course, all systems of oppression make justifications on the basis of immutable human nature, this belief is no different. 

Save the future by monetizing everything? A look at Jaron Lanier.

One interesting talk I heard was by Jaron Lanier to promote his book, Who Owns The Future?  The problem with technology as he sees it, is not that people are obsolete, it's that the payment method from that technology forces people to be obsolete and only empowers the elite.

There is no such thing as technology (or a free lunch) 

Put simply: free software (both propitiatory and open source) is never really free, it just gives out the software to everyone but doesn't pay the original creators. What ends up happening is the original creators become unemployed and the people that get rich are those who manage the "big computers" that run the software. 

Lanier gives the example of programmers that created translators, the software is given out to everyone with the theory that it benefits all but it comes at the expense of the original designers. Because of this, the rich (those control the "big computers") get richer and the middle class professionals get poorer, increasing inequality.

There is a lot to like from this; first it's true that open source has not shifted the software industry in a more egalitarian direction and that big companies have basically adopted the same thing. After all, no one pays to use Google or Facebook. 

The other is that it is a labor-oriented theory; one of the slogans Lanier uses is "there is no such thing as technology" meaning that all technology is ultimately derived from people's labor. And in some sense it is true that many upper-middle class professionals lose out from this scheme.

Professionals of the world unite? or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Monetizing  

The problem comes from Lanier's solutions. And while he has been humble in acknowledging that they are imperfect, he believes that the ultimate solution is to micro-monetize everything and have it go to the creators. The idea would be for every small action, a Google search or viewing a single photo or video, that would cost tiny amounts of money which would either go to whoever made the program or possibly to the uploader. Then most people would get paid in tiny amounts all the time to offset that.

First, lets look at the bigger picture. Lanier agrees that the ultimate problem is inequality and how it will effect the future right? Well the shift in technology is not primarily the cause of it. As many have pointed out, much the cause in wage stagnation has been elite repression through capital liberalization and all that follows from it (outsourcing, de-unionization etc.). As a study of the top 0.1 percent points out, the vast majority (40.8 percent) are managers and executives, only 3 percent are computer related. This means we're still living in an era of Wall Street not Silicon Valley. It also means we need to think carefully before restructuring everyday technology.

Secondly, very few ordinary people are programmers. It would be one thing if we lived in a world where most people are coders for translators but they aren't. Micro-monetizing might cut into the revenues of the elite, but it will only end up empowering a professional class at the very real expense of everyone else. And is having a newly enriched professional class that much better than a Wall Street elite? Consider for instance, unemployed or low-income working people. They're contributions in a micro-monetized economy might never make up for the income they'll lose doing things that are naturally free (like clicking on a video). 

And finally the entire specter of monetizing everything could create its own massive consequences. It would pretty be the reductio ad absurdum of objectivization since people's daily lives consist of constantly paying out and being paid by others. Living in a world where you have to learn code, whore yourself out online (to get more views) worry about getting paid every waking moment, or ignore it all by not having any access to the internet is dysfunctional to say the least.

It's owning the means of production stupid!

Lanier is dead set against the idea that the solution should be completely political. This is odd considering that most the problem (liberalized capital, economic concentration) is almost completely political in nature. The US government isn't just building giant surveillance databases in Utah because processors are getting better, it's because of increasing class tension from inequality. Likewise, "big computers" are big because corporations are concentrating wealth from the political decision to liberalize capital.

All this means the solution should be political in the sense of creating an alternative. The ultimate goal should be to take control of the means of production and democratically controlling the economy both internally (in the workplace) and systemically (the economy at large). With that kind of alternative, it would make technology follow suit or even become a side issue.