Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Bravely Making the World Safe for the Post-Employment Economy

What is the post-employment economy? That the phrase seems a bit obscure and overly dismal is itself a prime example of how deeply entrenched in self-delusion we are, and must be in capitalism's current form.

At the root of the countless reports, polls, and articles about how people born between the late 1980s and early 2000s are more likely than ever to either be unemployed, underemployed, or left out of the labor force entirely, is the specter of permanent post-employment. This economic reality, which we are in the thick of and is very much the new normal, has, like any other aspect of capitalism, created the need for radical, exotic new ideologies. Post-employment capitalism has spawned an ideology of the making sanguine of an economy without employees (other than de facto oligarchs and the thoroughly impoverished, of course.)

The alarmingly high rate of unemployment (which factors out the underemployed and those not even in the labor force) among "millennials" is rationalized in a variety of ways. People of the generations just prior to the millennial one (or Generation Y, as it used to be called), who could often kind of fall into decent work and not have to be a cutthroat, gleaming assassin of perfectly optimized employability just to simply be considered worthy of gaining access to the lower ranks of the middle class, rationalize the truly insane statistics as merely evidence that enormous swaths of American citizens born during a span of over twenty years are lazy. The power structure thrives on citizens having the worst possible opinions of each other.

The exceptionally eager adoption of the term 'millennial' by the media to describe every person born in a position to pay unprecedentedly high college tuition in a shrinking economy, with fewer jobs and stagnant wage growth, and little expectation of anything beyond temp work, seems a transparent enough attempt to casually dismiss the inheritors of this country as a massive outgroup. Who cares if the economy barely exists anymore? It's just a bunch of those icky millennials paying the price anyway. Perhaps a new term had to be found to replace Generation Y, as it was too similar to Generation X, and reminded those born between 1960 and 1980 that we, too, are human beings.

At best, the very real crisis of millions of people in their 20s and 30s, people who not too long ago used to start families, buy homes, and plant roots, not being permitted to start their lives is accepted as a legitimate issue because it may threaten the wider economy. Crises in human dignity, which is what millions of Americans not being granted the privilege of starting their lives really is, only flirt with non-triviality when they threaten the self-interest of people who have been able to effectively barricade themselves from experiencing them directly on a first-hand, daily level.

This shouldn't be a surprise--non-elite people aren't important, capital is. The Left lost, the world is safe for capitalism, thank God! Nothing new here. But people are still around. Ugh. Not only that, but there are more than ever! If only there were a way to remove those pesky humans from the picture entirely, while still generating capital. Oh wait, Foxconn built a fleet of thousands of robots to replace their already peerlessly debased workers? Enter the Foxbots!

That Foxconn, a company that built its power on supplying Apple with millions of human resources that could be bent, abused, whacked, and sapped to an extent impossible (as of now!) in America, is rapidly transitioning to cost-saving automated labor, is somehow both coldly unsurprising and shockingly brazen.

In the rapidly approaching mass automation of work, when robots do nearly everything, let's not forget what a robot is. It is a slave. ('Robot itself comes from Czech robota, "servitude, forced labor."') It is an ideal slave, beyond the wildest dreams of 19th century slave-owners. Our mad rush into robonomics shows how little our outlook on labor has actually changed since the days when human slavery generated much of the West's wealth--we still want slave labor more than anything. We have not even tried to begin imagining a different set of economic values, in which human life counted for more than as little as possible.

The column "Are Millennials Underemployed--Or Just Lazy?" by Kelly Clay is a compelling example of the self-delusion needed to keep marching headlong into our increasingly inevitable post-employment economy.

First, the obvious: Kelly Clay is a millennial, and presumably has experienced how mightily the deck is stacked against people who had the poor taste to be born anywhere close to that time. Second, her entire "thesis" is an exhilaratingly absurd exercise in delusion: essentially, "are statistical facts true, or does my hastily drawn opinion negate their existence?" That she was able to develop even a minimal bit of logic to support this absurd premise is a nice example of how even the most irrational thinking can manage to perpetuate itself, and indeed thrive. A frightening situation, indeed.

Another worrisome trend is in the contortions writers are going through to rationalize the marginalization of the silly human part of our economy. Establishment shill Kyle Chayka is bad enough with his fetishization of the schizophrenia, er, I mean, entrepreneurial gusto, the virtue of being sufficiently flexible to scratch out slightly above poverty wages in our exciting catch-as-catch-can permanent post-employee climate. (And yes, if you write for Gawker, and especially produce Gawker hit pieces assaulting open expression, you are about as much of an establishment shill as it's possible to be right now).

This LinkedIn emetic by Daniel Hill is a perhaps even sadder expression of how writers are bending over backwards to portray the systematic erosion of middle class American dignity as a fun challenge to be embraced. Mr. Hill opines: "It doesn’t matter who you are. A CEO, making $50 million dollars a year still has to worry every day that the shareholders may call for their resignation if growth doesn't meet the expected projections. A maintenance worker still has to worry that their position does not become outsourced to a 3rd party company, hiring contractors willing to do the same job for less money and no health benefits."

Viewing this state of affairs as hopelessly absurd is not permitted. A situation in which people feel compelled to maniacally stockpile tens of millions of dollars because of the constant looming fun possibility of going bankrupt, and in which a citizen with minimal economic dignity has to worry about losing what little he has to a fellow citizen desperate enough to accept an even more attractively undignified (from the employer's POV) economic lot in life, is just an opportunity for us to bare our teeth, roll up our sleeves, and dig in. It is not insane or unreasonable--it is our fault for not sufficiently modifying our bodies and minds and souls to the whims of capital. Reason must at no point be permitted to come into contact with the experiences and impressions of one's daily life. Advanced capitalism doesn't ask much of us, but it does ask that.

Anyone familiar with the contemporary job search has gotten used to seeing words like "ideal," "amazing," "perfect fit," etc., in job descriptions for even entry level "roles" in most industries. The right to enter moderate middle class esteem is at best an extreme, rare privilege reserved only for the most savvy, capitalistically conscientious, at worst indistinguishable from playing the lottery.

By no means should the opportunity to live a middle class life be granted to Americans who have the audacity to want to simply try to become decent citizens and start their lives. The middle class lifestyle is reserved for "rock stars" only, thank you very much.

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