Critical book review URGENT DUE TODAY 12/17!!!!11:59 Must have access to the book “FOUR FUTURES
Soc 300 Four Futures book review assignment
Task: The task of this assignment is to write a short, critical review of the book Four Futures which we are reading in class. The assignment should be approximately 3-5 pages in length (typed, double spaced, 12 point font, with page numbers) and submitted through Blackboard
The purpose of the assignment is to review the book.
First, a review gives the reader a concise summary of the content. This includes a relevant description of the topic as well as its overall perspective, argument, or purpose.
Second, and more importantly, a review offers a critical assessment of the content. This involves your reactions to the work under review: what strikes you as noteworthy, whether or not it was effective or persuasive, and how it enhanced your understanding of the issues at hand.
You should focus, then, on the books topic of Life after capitalism, and discuss what may happen, according to the books analysis. But you should also be focused on Frases sociological thinking and analysis about this topic. Think about how the book is organized into four main sections communism, rentism, socialism and exterminism, as this is important for the review.
You should also check, before handing in, your paper for problems with grammar, punctuation, sentence structure and overall organization. You should include at least 1 to 2 long quotes and a few shorter quotes.
Four Futures
The Jacobin series features short interrogations of politics, economics, and culture from a socialist perspective, as an avenue to radical political practice. The books offer critical analysis and engagement with the history and ideas of the Left in an accessible format.
The series is a collaboration between Verso Books and Jacobin magazine, which is published quarterly in print and online at jacobinmag.com.
Other titles in this series available from Verso Books:
The New Prophets of Capital by Nicole Aschoff
Playing the Whore by Melissa Gira Grant
Utopia or Bust by Benjamin Kunkel
Strike for America by Micah Uetricht
Class War by Megan Erickson
Four Futures
Visions of the World After Capitalism
PETER FRASE
This edition first published by Verso 2016
Peter Frase 2016
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
versobooks.com
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-813-7
ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-815-1 (US EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-814-4 (UK EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Frase, Peter, author.
Title: Four futures : visions of the world after capitalism / by Peter Frase.
Description: Brooklyn, NY : Verso, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016023756 (print) | LCCN 2016036476 (ebook) | ISBN 9781781688137 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781781688151
Subjects: LCSH: Economics. | Economic forecasting. | Economic history. | Capitalism.
Classification: LCC HB72 .F6775 2016 (print) | LCC HB72 (ebook) | DDC 330–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016023756
Typeset in Fournier by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh, Scotland
Printed in the US by Maple Press
CONTENTS
Introduction: Technology and Ecology as Apocalypse and Utopia
1.Communism: Equality and Abundance
2.Rentism: Hierarchy and Abundance
3.Socialism: Equality and Scarcity
4.Exterminism: Hierarchy and Scarcity
Notes
Conclusion: Transitions and Prospects
INTRODUCTION:
TECHNOLOGY AND ECOLOGY
AS APOCALYPSE AND UTOPIA
Two specters are haunting Earth in the twenty-first century: the specters of ecological catastrophe and automation.
In 2013, a US government observatory recorded that global concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide had reached 400 parts per million for the first time in recorded history.
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This threshold, which the Earth had not passed in as many as 3 million years, heralds accelerating climate change over the coming century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts diminishing sea ice, acidification of the oceans, and increasing frequency of droughts and extreme storm events.
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At the same time, news of technological breakthroughs in the context of high unemployment and stagnant wages has produced anxious warnings about the effects of automation on the future of work. In early 2014, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee published The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies.
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They surveyed a future in which computer and robotics technology replaces human labor not just in traditional domains such as agriculture and manufacturing, but also in sectors ranging from medicine and law to transportation. At Oxford University, a research unit released a widely publicized report estimating that nearly half the jobs in the United States today are vulnerable to computerization.
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These twin anxieties are in many ways diametrical opposites. The fear of climate change is a fear of having too little: it anticipates a scarcity of natural resources, the loss of agricultural land and habitable environmentsand ultimately the demise of an Earth that can support human life. The fear of automation is, perversely, a fear of too much: a fully robotized economy that produces so much, with so little human labor, that there is no longer any need for workers. Can we really be facing a crisis of scarcity and a crisis of abundance at the same time?
The argument of this book is that we are in fact facing such a contradictory dual crisis. And it is the interaction of these two dynamics that makes our historical moment so volatile and uncertain, full of both promise and danger. In the chapters that follow, I will attempt to sketch some of the possible interactions between these two dynamics.
First, however, I need to lay out the contours of current debates over automation and climate change.
Rise of the Robots
Welcome Robot Overlords, reads a feature headline published in 2013 by Mother Jones magazine, Please Dont Fire Us?
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The article, by liberal pundit Kevin Drum, exemplifies a raft of coverage in recent years, surveying the rapid spread of automation and computerization throughout every part of the economy. These stories tend to veer between wonder and dread at the possibilities of all this new gadgetry. In stories like Drums, rapid progress in automation heralds the possibility of a world with a better quality of life and more leisure time for all; but alternatively, it heralds mass unemployment and the continued enrichment of the 1 percent.
This is not a new tension by any means. The folk tale of John Henry and the steam hammer, which originated in the nineteenth century, describes a railroad worker who tries to race against a steel powered drill and winsonly to drop dead from the effort. But several factors have come together to accentuate worries about technology and its effect on labor. The persistently weak post-recession labor market has produced a generalized background anxiety about job loss. Automation and computerization are beginning to reach into professional and creative industries that long seemed immune, threatening the jobs of the very journalists who cover these issues. And the pace of change at least seems, to many, to be faster than ever.
The second machine age is a concept promoted by Brynjolfsson and McAfee. In their book of the same name, they argue that just as the first machine agethe Industrial Revolutionreplaced human muscle with machine power, computerization is allowing us to greatly magnify, or even replace, the ability to use our brains to understand and shape our environments.
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In that book and its predecessor, Race Against the Machine, Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue that computers and robots are rapidly permeating every part of the economy, displacing labor from high- and low-skill functions alike. Central to their view is the processing of much of the world into digital information, with everything from books and music to street networks now available in a form that can be copied and transmitted around the world instantly and nearly for free.
The applications that this kind of data enables are enormously varied, especially in combination with advances in physical-world robotics and sensing. In a widely cited study using a detailed analysis of different occupations produced by the US Department of Labor, Oxford University researchers Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne speculated that 47 percent of current US employment is susceptible to computerization thanks to current technological developments.
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Stuart Elliott at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development uses the same source data but a different approach over a longer time frame and suggested that the figure could be as high as 80 percent. These figures are the result of both subjective classifying decisions and complex quantitative methodology, so it would be a mistake to put too much faith in any exact number. Nevertheless, it should be clear that the possibility of rapid further automation in the near future is very real.
Brynjolfsson and McAfee are perhaps the best-known prophets of rapid automation, but their work fits into an exploding genre. Software entrepreneur Martin Ford, for example, explores similar terrain in his 2015 work Rise of the Robots.
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He relies on much of the same literature and reaches many of the same conclusions about the pace of automation. His conclusions are somewhat more radicala guaranteed universal basic income, which will be discussed later in this book, occupies a place of prominence; much of the rival literature, by contrast, offers little more than bromides about education.
That many people are writing about rapid and socially dislocating automation doesnt mean that its an imminent reality. As I noted above, anxiety about labor-saving technology is actually a constant through the whole history of capitalism. But we do see many indications that we now have the possibilityalthough not necessarily the realityof drastically reducing the need for human labor. A few examples will demonstrate the diverse areas in which human labor is being reduced or eliminated entirely.
In 2011, IBM made headlines with its Watson supercomputer, which successfully competed and won against human competitors on the game show Jeopardy. Although this feat was a somewhat frivolous publicity stunt, it also demonstrated Watsons suitability for other, more valuable tasks. The technology is already being tested to assist doctors in processing the enormous volume of medical literature to better diagnose patients, which in fact was the systems original purpose. But it is also being released as the Watson Engagement Advisor, which is intended for customer service and technical support applications. By responding to free-form natural language queries from users, this software could potentially replace the call center workers (many in places like India) who currently perform this work. The review of legal documents, an extremely time-consuming process traditionally performed by legions of junior lawyers, is another promising application of the technology.
Another area of rapid advance is robotics, the interaction of machinery with the physical world. Over the twentieth century, great advances were made in the development of large-scale industrial robots, of the sort that could operate a car assembly line. But only recently have they begun to challenge the areas in which humans excel: fine-grained motor skills and the navigation of a complex physical terrain. The US Department of Defense is now developing computer-controlled sewing machines so as to avoid sourcing its uniforms from China.
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Until just the past few years, self-driving cars were regarded as well beyond the scope of our technical ability. Now the combination of sensor technology and comprehensive map databases is making it a reality in such projects as the Google self-driving fleet. Meanwhile a company called Locus Robotics has launched a robot that can process orders in giant warehouses, potentially replacing the workers for Amazon and other companies who currently toil in often brutal conditions.
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Automation continues to proceed even in agriculture, which once consumed the largest share of human labor but now makes up a tiny fraction of employment, especially in the United States and other rich countries. In California, changing Mexican economic conditions and border crackdowns have led to labor shortages. This has spurred farmers to invest in new machinery that can take on even delicate tasks like fruit harvesting, which have until now required the precision of a human hand.
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This development illustrates a recurrent capitalist dynamic: as workers become more powerful and better paid, the pressure on capitalists to automate increases. When there is a huge pool of low wage migrant farm labor, a $100,000 fruit picker looks like a wasteful indulgence. But when workers are scarce and can command better wages, the incentive to replace them with machinery is intensified.
The trend toward automation runs through the entire history of capitalism. In recent years it was muted and somewhat disguised, because of the enormous injection of cheap labor that global capitalism received after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the turn toward capitalism in China. But now even Chinese companies are facing labor shortages and looking to new ways of automating and robotizing.
Innumerable further examples can be produced. Robot anesthesiologists to replace physicians. A hamburger-making machine that can replace the staff of a McDonalds. Large-scale 3-D printers that can turn out entire houses within a day. Each week brings strange new things.
Automation is liable to move beyond even this, into the oldest and most fundamental form of womens labor. In the 1970s, the radical feminist theorist Shulamith Firestone called for growing babies in artificial wombs, as a way to liberate women from their dominated position in the relations of reproduction.
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Fanciful at the time, such technologies are becoming a reality today. Japanese scientists have successfully birthed goats from artificial wombs and grown human embryos for up to ten days. Further work on applying this technology to human babies is now as much restricted by law as science; Japan prohibits growing human embryos artificially for longer than fourteen days.
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Many women find such a prospect off-putting and welcome the experience of carrying a child. But surely many others would prefer to be liberated from the obligation.
Most of this book will take for granted the premise of the automation optimists, that within as little as a few decades we could live in a Star Treklike world where, as Kevin Drum put it in Mother Jones, robots can do everything humans can do, and they do it uncomplainingly, 24 hours a day, and scarcity of ordinary consumer goods is a thing of the past.
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Such claims are likely to be hyperbole, which for the purposes of this book is fine: my approach is deliberately hyperbolic, sketching out simplified ideal types to illustrate fundamental principles. Its not important that absolutely everything will be done by robots, only that a large amount of the labor currently done by humans is in the process of being automated away.
But there remains much controversy over just how fast automation can proceed and what processes will be susceptible to it. So before delving into the possible social consequences of that process, I will sketch out some of the recent, rapid developments in the so-called second machine age we live in. This is a sequel toor, as some see it, merely an extension ofthe first machine age of large-scale industrial automation.
Fear of a Mechanical Planet
Objections to the predictions and fears of wide-ranging automation fall into three broad categories. Some argue that reports of new technology are overhyped and overblown and that we are a long way from truly being able to replace human labor in most fields. Others, following a traditional argument from mainstream economics, contend that past episodes of rapid productivity growth have simply opened up new kinds of work and new jobs, not led to massive unemployment, and that this time will be no different. Finally, some on the Left see an obsessive focus on futuristic automation scenarios as a distraction from more pressing political tasks such as government investment and stimulus and improved wages and conditions in the workplace.
REPORTS OF LABORS DEMISE: GREATLY EXAGGERATED?
Those who believe that technology is given exaggerated significance usually point to the published statistics on productivity growth. A large-scale adoption of robots and machinery ought to show up as a rapid increase in the statistics that measure the productivity of laborthat is, the amount of output that can be generated per worker. But in fact, the rate of productivity growth in recent years has been relatively low. In the United States, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that from 2007 to 2014, the annual rate of change was only 1.4 percent. Thats a pace lower than at any time since the 1970s and half what was seen during the postwar boom years.
This leads some to argue that the anecdotal accounts of great breakthroughs in robotics and computation are misleading, because they arent actually being translated into economic results. The economists Tyler Cowen and Robert Gordon are most closely associated with this view.
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Doug Henwood, of the Left Business Observer, makes a similar case from the Left.
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For more conservative economists like Cowen and Gordon, the problem is largely technical. The new technologies arent really all that great, at least from an economic perspective, compared to breakthroughs like electricity or the internal combustion engine. Weve picked the low-hanging fruit, in Cowens terms, and unless we find some more were doomed to slow growth for the foreseeable future.
Left critics, like Henwood and Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, locate our problems not in technology, but in policy. For them, blaming the weak economic recovery after the 2008 recession on automation is a distraction from the real issue, which is that government policy has not been sufficiently focused on fiscal stimulus and job creation, thus preventing the economy from reaching full employment. Worries about robots are, from this point of view, both counter-factual (because productivity growth is low) and politically reactionary.
But others, including Brynjolfsson and McAfee, argue that even if no great fundamental breakthroughs are on the horizon, there is much to be gained from refining and recombining the breakthroughs we have already seen. This is a common historical pattern; many new techniques that were discovered during the Great Depression, for example, werent economically fully exploited until the postwar boom. Moreover, even those changes that dont get reflected numerically in the Gross Domestic Product can still contribute to our social wealthlike the huge volume of information available freely and rapidly on the Internet, which has greatly increased my efficiency in writing this book.
To leftist critics of the automation narrative, we can offer a more complex answer: their analysis is narrowly correct but doesnt look far enough ahead. This is because the recent trends in productivity can also be read as reflections of a curious tension between the economys short-term equilibrium and its long-term potential.
The first two recessions of the twenty-first century led to weak recoveries, characterized by stagnant wages and high unemployment. In that context, the existence of a large pool of unemployed and low-wage workers operates as a disincentive for employers to automate. After all, why replace a worker with a robot, if the worker is cheaper? But a corollary to this principle is that, if wages begin to rise and labor markets tighten, employers will start to turn to the new technologies that are currently being developed, rather than pay the cost of additional labor. As I argue in the following sections, the real impediments to tight labor markets are currently political, not technological.
AUTOMATIONS ETERNAL RETURN
Mainstream economists have for generations made the same argument about the supposed danger that automation poses to labor. If some jobs are automated, they argue, labor is freed up for other, new, and perhaps better kinds of work. They point to agriculture, which once occupied most of the workforce but now occupies only about 2 percent of it in a country like the United States. The decline of agricultural employment freed up workers who would go into the factories and make up the great industrial manufacturing economy of the mid-twentieth century. And the subsequent automation and offshoring of manufacturing, in turn, led to the boom in the service sector.
Why, then, should today be any different? If a robot takes your job, something else will surely be on the horizon. Supporters of this position can point to previous waves of anxiety about automation, such as the one in the 1990s that produced works like Jeremy Rifkins The End of Work and Stanley Aronowitz and Bill DeFazios The Jobless Future.
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As early as 1948, the mathematician and cyberneticist Norbert Weiner warned in his book Cybernetics that in the second, cybernetic industrial revolution, we were approaching a society in which the average human being of mediocre attainments or less has nothing to sell that it is worth anyones money to buy.
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While many jobs have indeed been lost to automation, and jobless rates have risen and fallen with the business cycle, the social crisis of extreme mass unemployment, which many of these authors anticipated, has failed to arrive.
Of course, this is the kind of argument that can only be made from a great academic height, while ignoring the pain and disruption caused to actual workers who are displaced, whether or not they can eventually find new work. And even some in the mainstream suspect that, perhaps, this time really is different. Nobel Prizewinner and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is perhaps the most prominent person to give voice to these doubts.
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But the deeper problem with the traditional analysis is that it poses the process as a scientific inevitability when it is actually a social and political choice.
Today, most labor struggles turn on increasing wages and benefits or improving working conditions. But until the time of the Great Depression in the 1930s, socialist and labor movements struggled for, and won, progressive reductions in the length of the working day as well. In the nineteenth century, the ten-hour-day movement gave way to the eight-hour-day movement. Even in the 1930s, the American Federation of Labor supported a law to reduce the work week to thirty hours. But after World War II, for a variety of reasons, work reduction gradually disappeared from labors agenda. The forty-hour (or more) week was taken for granted, and the question became merely how well it would be compensated.
This would have surprised the economist John Maynard Keynes, who speculated in the 1930s that people in our time would work as little as fifteen hours per week. That would mean working less than a third of the forty-hour work week that is still widely considered to be the standard. And yet productivity since Keyness time has more than tripled, so it would have been possible to take that growth in the form of free time for the masses. This didnt happen, not because it isnt technically possible, but because of the outcomes of the political choices and social struggles of the twentieth century.
Some will argue that keeping our high working hours was worth it, because it made possible all the trappings of our modern world that Keynes could never have imagined, such as smartphones, flat-screen televisions, and the Internet. Because when most people think about working shorter hours, they think that they will have to give up some of the trappings of our advanced capitalist society, things that they enjoy, like their smartphones and their televisions.
That might be true to some extent, depending on the degree of work reduction were talking about. But reducing work time can also reduce the cost of living, because it gives us time to do things that we would otherwise have to pay someone else to do, and it reduces costs like commuting that we have to pay just in order to work. And beyond that, our current society is filled with work that doesnt add anything to human flourishing and exists only to enrich someone elses bottom linethings like the collection of student loans (which would not exist if education were free) and many big-bank positions that facilitate dangerous and destabilizing speculation.
In any case, if we were to decide to make work reduction a social priority, we could gradually reduce hours in line with increases in productivity, so that people could gradually work less and less, while enjoying the same standard of living. And while some might prefer to keep working more in order to accumulate more and more stuff, probably many others would not. Even if we can never reach the pure post-work utopia, we can certainly move closer to it. Decreasing the work week from forty hours to thirty would move us in that direction. So would something like a universal basic income, which guarantees a minimum payment to every citizen regardless of work or any of the other strings that are attached to traditional welfare plans.
TECHNOPHILIA AS A TECHNOLOGY OF DISTRACTION
Even supposing that, in the long run, the political questions and possibilities raised by automation are real, a good argument can be made that we face more significant short-term challenges. As noted above, productivity growth, which gives an indication of the number of workers actually needed to run the economy, has in fact been quite weak in recent years. Moreover, the lack of job growth after recent economic recessions can plausibly be attributed not to robots, but to failures of government policy.
Thats because in the short run, the lack of jobs can be attributed not to automation, but to a lack of what is known, in the economists jargon, as aggregate demand. In other words, the reason employers dont hire more workers is because there arent enough people buying their products, and the reason people arent buying their products is because they dont have enough moneyeither because they dont have jobs or because their wages are too low.
The solution to this situation, according to traditional Keynesian economic theories, is for the government to increase demand by a combination of monetary policy (lowering interest rates), fiscal policy (government investment in job creation, for instance through building infrastructure), and regulation (such as a higher minimum wage). And while governments did lower interest rates after the Great Recession, they did not do so in combination with sufficient investment in job creation, leading to a jobless recovery in which outputthat is, the quantity of goods and services producedslowly began to grow again, but employment did not return to its prerecession levels.
I do not disagree that the traditional Keynesian remedies remain important and necessary, as far as they go. And I share the worry that, in some cases, the specter of the robot future is used by the political center and right to distract attention from the short-term problems of the unemployed, in order to make it seem as though mass unemployment and underemployment are simply inevitable.
But I still think its worth talking about what a more highly automated future could mean for all of us. Thats partly because, contrary to the skeptics, I do think that the possibility for further labor-saving technology is being rapidly developed, even if it isnt yet finding its way into the economy in a way thats reflected in the productivity statistics. And its also because even if the short-term obstacle of austerity economics and insufficient government stimulus is overcome, we still face the political question that we have faced ever since the industrial revolution: will new technologies of production lead to greater free time for all, or will we remain locked into a cycle in which productivity gains only benefit the few, while the rest of us work longer than ever?
The Specter of Climate Crisis
Thus far, Ive discussed only one of the challenges that I cited at the outset, the threat posed by technology that displaces workers. But the second, the ecological crisis, is at least as significant for the future of capitalism and of the human race. The scientific consensus about climate change is clear. Human carbon emissions are warming the atmosphere, leading to hotter temperatures, extreme weather, and shortages of water and other essential resources. Differences of opinion chiefly concern how serious the effects will be, how disruptive they will be to human civilization, and how (or whether) it will be possible to adjust to those disruptions.
Many readers will no doubt be thinking that this does not exhaust the limits of debate, for there are also those who deny the existence of human-caused climate change entirely. These people certainly exist, and they are backed by very deep-pocketed corporate interests and have prominent advocates within major political parties. But it would be a mistake to take these people as proponents of a serious scientific debate. The small fringe of writers and scientists who promote denialist theories may or may not be sincere in their claims to pursue truth, but their funders must be regarded as cynics, whose actions promote a different agenda.
For as we will see in a later chapter, the key question surrounding climate change is not whether climate change is occurring, but rather who will survive the change. Even in the worst-case scenarios, scientists are not arguing that the Earth will become totally uninhabitable. What will happenand is happeningis that struggles over space and resources will intensify as habitats degrade. In this contextand particularly in concert with the technological trends discussed aboveit may be possible for a small elite to continue to pollute the planet, protecting their own comfort while condemning most of the worlds population to misery. It is that agenda, not any serious engagement with climate science, that drives corporate titans in the direction of denialism.
Not all capitalists are committed to denialism, however. Some who acknowledge the magnitude of climate change nevertheless insist that that we can trust the workings of the free market to deliver solutions. But while this is not in fact totally absurd, it is highly misleading. For the enlightened eco-capitalists turn out to not really be so different from the troglodyte denialists.
Entrepreneurs, we are assured, will find new green technologies that will move us away from fossil fuel dependence without government intervention. But in many cases, these innovations involve high-tech green solutions that are only accessible to the rich. At the same time, truly global solutions are rejected, even when, as in the case of taxing carbon, they are ostensibly market solutions. The initiatives that excite the eco-capitalists are, instead, fanciful projects of geoengineering that attempt to manipulate the climate, despite the uncertain efficacy and unknown side effects of such procedures. As with the Koch brothers and their denialist ilk, the eco-capitalists are concerned primarily with preserving the prerogatives and lifestyles of the elite, even if they put a more environmentalist veneer on this agenda. We will return to all of this in Chapter 4.
I turn now to the specific purpose of this book.
Politics in Command
Why, the reader might ask, is it even necessary to write another book about automation and the postwork future? The topic has become an entire subgenre in recent years; Brynjolfsson and McAfee are just one example. Others include Fords Rise of the Robots and articles from the Atlantics Derek Thompson, Slates Farhad Manjoo, and Mother Joness Kevin Drum.
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Each insists that technology is rapidly making work obsolete, but they flail vainly at an answer to the problem of making sure that technology
