Abstract
The midterm elections undermined all exercises in futurology. The best answer to what lies ahead might be “you never know.” Trump lost, Trump won. The Democrats won, the Democrats lost, and then won where they thought they had lost. Progressive Democrats won and lost. Candidates of color won, yet racial and nationalist fears of the alien “other” had a good day. The Republican Party won, but is owned lock, stock, and barrel by the man its leadership never wanted to be President. The Democratic Party won but is led by the same aging forces that orchestrated its defeat just two years ago. It’s a muddle, but Ted Fertik nonetheless tries to assess what it all might mean from the standpoint of labor and the progressive movement.
Like accurate fortune telling, original insights into the workings of an ever-evolving capitalism are rare occurrences. New Labor Forum is proud to be publishing one. Shoshana Zuboff’s article presents a theory of surveillance capitalism (an essay-length summation of her just published book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power). In Zuboff’s view surveillance capitalism opens up a whole new era in capital accumulation. It relies on a process of primitive accumulation, which has always been characteristic of capitalism but extends capital’s reach beyond nature and human labor into the interior, intimate life of human beings, by tracking, manipulating, and trading in human behavior. She calls the new system the “Big Other” and ponders what new forms of collective resistance might emerge to challenge the dominion of surveillance capitalism.
American dominion over most of the globe has been a fact of life for many decades. The price in blood and treasure, both abroad and at home, has been ghastly. Yet for some time now, even as the forces of progressive reform have grown at an astonishing rate, the new left as a whole, pre-occupied with domestic political issues, has failed to offer an alternative vision of a left foreign policy. Aziz Rana does that here. Along the way, he urges the left to break through the artificial division between domestic and foreign affairs, arguing, as did social democrats of yesteryear, that the dominion of capital at home depends on its political and economic over-lordship throughout the rest of the world. The material well-being and freedom of working people everywhere are organically linked, and that must inform the way a progressive America behaves abroad.
Surveillance capitalists as well as more conventional enterprises rely on a workforce that gathers on what have come to be known as “platforms.” This might be roughly likened to those old-time shape-ups of casual labor, but now assembling in virtual reality, bringing together workers and customers brokered by enterprise intermediaries like Uber and Lyft. Workers in this sector and the work they do varies widely; some paid decently, some not, some short term, single-tasked, and precarious, some more ongoing if also inherently insecure, like freelance programming and graphic design, some highly skilled, some less so. Steven Vallas describes this new zone of labor and analyzes its character, divisions, and prospects. It has been assumed that among the most highly skilled and best paid software engineers and technicians, the chances of collective resistance to the labor and other managerial practices of the giants of the industry were virtually nil. However, Julianne Tveten records the growing fight back on the part of precisely these kinds of workers at places like Google and Microsoft. And since her story was filed, the simultaneous world-wide temporary shut-down of Google facilities over the issue of sexual harassment (and managerial autocracy more generally) has demonstrated that the ethos of solidarity is flourishing even in once arid soil.
Sexual harassment is hardly confined to Silicon Valley. It’s ubiquitous. And that includes inside the labor movement. Ana Avendaño examines the multiple forms this takes, how divisive and debilitating it is, and how slow and sometimes resistant trade union leaders have been in taking measures to eliminate it. Always a serious problem, it is, if anything, more so today when women make up such a large and growing percentage of the organized working class. While, at least officially, organized labor now stands with the women’s movement in opposition to sexual harassment, sex worker organizers have been received with much more mixed reactions. In the “Working-Class Voices” column, Riley Renegade, a sex worker and sex-worker organizer, makes note of the trepidation of feminists and labor organizers toward this form of labor that far predates capitalism. She describes the harmful and rewarding nature of her work in a segment of this multi-billion dollar industry.
In France, what was called “the republican front” managed to stop Marine Le Pen from becoming the country’s president in 2017 by uniting left and center-right parties behind the victorious candidacy of Emmanuel Macron. Since then this has turned into a case of “careful what you wish for.” Macron and the movement he assembled used their huge electoral majority to undertake an assault on the French Labor Code that had protected the country’s workers for decades. For a host of reasons, the Macron regime has proved increasingly unpopular, finally sparking mass uprisings by the French working-class in the form of the Yellow Vests. George Ross explores the intricacies of French (and Eurozone) politics to analyze the Macron phenomenon and the current predicament of the French labor movement.
Although the dilemma of the American labor movement is far worse than what’s happening in France, there are some encouraging signs. In New York City a movement called “#CountMeIn,” inaugurated by the city’s building trades unions, has taken on the biggest real estate developers. The campaign is designed to stop efforts to deunionize construction work, and to do so by healing the racial and territorial divisions that have hobbled the trades for a long time. David Mirtz analyzes the origins of “#Count Me In” and the way the campaign has tried to identify its own struggles with the broader resistance to corporate domination. As for public sector unions, the recent Supreme Court decision in the Janus case was a body blow. But Luke Elliot-Negri and Marc Kagan make the intriguing case that in New York State Janus can be interpreted to make organizing among adjunct teachers easier than it once was.
Other hopeful signs of fight-back by working people are noted in Sarah Jaffe’s “Under the Radar” column, including the strike of Ryanair airline workers in Europe, a campaign for rent control in New York, and an attempt by the staff of a Montana newspaper to unionize. In her “Roots of Rebellion” column Mariya Strauss describes the protracted campaign by a coalition of West Virginia environmentalists and community activists to stop fracking. While the Republican Party harbors no labor-friendly instincts, it is good to see divisions in the party widen between its Fortune 500 wing and the Trump administration, as Max Fraser analyzes in “Organized Money” with particular emphasis on the Koch brothers break with the regime. Sean Sweeney in his “Earth to Labor” column offers some sobering thoughts about how hard science simply won’t support the consoling notion that the international goal to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius can be achieved simply by shifting to renewable forms of energy.
Our Books and the Arts section presents two reviews of important books: one, a book by Kim Moody, examines the author’s claim that we are entering a new phase of working-class insurgency; the other, a review of a book about health and safety in the workplace by Jeffrey Pfeffer, argues that the author’s optimism about relying on more broad-minded CEOs to lead the way to make work safer is misplaced. As always Matt Witt’s “Out of the Mainstream” column highlights books and films you may have missed.