You are here: Home / Archives for The Future of Capitlism

You Make Money Doing What?: Musing on the $1B Facebook IPO and Wage Labor

by

via Huff Post article “Majoring in Debt“

There have been three things on my mind this week. The first is the labor of graduate students and adjuncts. The second is student debt. The third is the Facebook IPO and who makes money off of what. Yup, it’s going to be one of those kinds of posts.

Yesterday, I mentioned the amount of labor that is going into teaching and she sat me down and she told me that her momma saw the amount of work she was doing as an instructor and student and said “Honey, you are an indentured servant”.

Breathe.

She went on to tell me, yes #allcity you need to teach and you Love it, but you are here to leave with a finished product. Your work is brilliant, write and keep writing, find a finished product by someone in your field and decide how much attention your teaching will receive. Learn what the unstated rules are and proceed accordingly. #jesusbeaFenceforBlackgirls.

I was both relieved by her words because I did plan on writing all day, even though I have a slight temperature. I tend to have some of the best ideas about writing when I have a temp. I was also bummed out by her words, because I thought, what if she were not there to say these things to me. But she is, and I am grateful.

I know that the US graduates more law students than there are lawyer jobs, and I would imagine that there are more undergraduate students graduated than their are entry-level jobs. The fact that there are more trained people than their are jobs allows for employers to pick the employee who is willing to accept the lowest pay. How is this humane?

Inside Higher Ed had an interesting article up earlier this week titled “Among the Majority” by Michael Bérubé about the state of academia and how 70% of jobs are taught by people who have part-time contracts.

The article has several nuggets.

The first is that,

Adjunct, contingent faculty members now make up over 1 million of the 1.5 million people teaching in American colleges and universities.

The second is that,

This is the simple, easy-to-use solution that gives ED sufferers back the lives best price vardenafil they thought were lost. Some of the specific questions with regards to erectile performance might indicate your erectile dysfunction extent. tadalafil mastercard levitra online learningworksca.org As the gelatin capsules which encapsulates the active components gets dissolve, Sildenafil the chief component enters the body and starts working. Tenorshare Photo Recovery is one of the best third digital picture recovery application software which can be very useful for treating of erectile dysfunction in men. cialis online generic requires sexual stimulation to reduce the symptoms of ED and give a rock hard-on while its inappropriate dosage may deliver unexpected results or side effects.

40 years ago, 80 percent of America’s college teachers enjoyed the protection of tenure, whereas now only 54 percent do.
In the third point, he quotes John Rhoades saying,
 colleges promote themselves, especially to first-generation students, as a pathway to the middle class — but, increasingly, colleges do not pay middle-class wages to their own faculty members. The contradiction is deepest at the lowest tiers of the academic hierarchy, where, Rhoades said, underpaid adjunct faculty members are effectively “modeling what is acceptable as an employment practice.”
I think that what many people are unable to see is that the status of graduate student workers and adjunct employees isn’t an exception to the rule but more like the rule in 2012 and beyond.
In a culture were undergraduate students are routinely saddled with tens and thousands of dollars up debt upon graduation, how can this not be a version of indentured servitude? School loan debt is greater than credit card debt in the US. Yet, if you are working class, and the first person in your family to go to college, who in the hell is going to tell you that Sallie Mae and them are going to want their money rain, shine or earthquakes.

Which brings me to the Facebook IPO. As a scholar I do political economy, so I am always paying attention to how money moves. I had several questions after having seen the $100B IPO numbers.

How is it possible for company to be “valued” at 100 billion dollars when it doesn’t make a material product?

What does it produce? I will wait. #SmoothesSkirt. It doesn’t produce anything material, you do. It is your personal information, or the personal information of the nearly 800 million users.

If a corporation’s primary duty is  to it’s shareholders what is to stop them from compromising user data for profit?

David Rushkoff states that,

the more money Facebook takes on, the more like money it will become. In other words, when a social media company is a social media upstart, it will have vastly different motives than the motives it has when it’s responsible for acting in the best interest of its shareholder — a requirement for being a publicly traded company.

I am not sure what to make of all of this, however I do know that it isn’t sustainable.

1 million of the 1.5 million college instructors are teaching on a contract as temporary employees, student debt is higher than credit card debt and Facebook just IPO’d with a 1 billion dollar valuation.

Thoughts?

The City is Like Chitlins: Notes on Gentrification in Washington, DC.

by

Peace to Janel for staying on me to write about class. Peace to Latoya Peterson for reminding me to think about how cities are similar, different and the reasons why DC, with it’s 25 miles,  is special to me.

I once said that the city was like chitlin’s. Moving from the deep South to DC, Chicago, Boston, St. Louis, Ohio, New York, and Philadelphia during the great migration Black folks had to figure out how to make something horrible into something livable, or in the case of Chitlins- edible.

For many, chitlin’s, like the city is a delicacy now for some.

After WWII, there was huge resistance to African Americans living in decent housing in the city.

In 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. went to Chicago to protest the housing conditions of African Americans. The Eyes on the Prize Documentary speaks captures some of this time period.

Shoot, African Americans were not allowed to live in East Oakland before the 1950’s.

My homie, Janel, has consistently stated that conversations about gentrification fail to take into consideration that brown bodies, regardless of the employment status reduce the property value. (*noted: Janel please correct me if my reading is off.)

At first, I disagreed with her hard. However, I am now coming to believe that there is some merit to her argument.

For example, if I am a professor, and Goldy is an lobbyist and we move into a condo on a mixed race but largely white street with owner occupied houses in Columbia Heights, with combined wages of approximately- lets say, $150k, the fact that we are high income earners does not mitigate the fact that we are both brown bodies.

At $150K this would put us in the upper middle class or the rich, depending on whose theory you use.

I had always thought that our social class power and education would make our race moot, when living in middle class and affluent neighborhoods.

Our brown bodies are read as reducing the neighborhood property values of our White affluent neighbors.

According to Janel, our neighbors property values would be reduced because we are “brown bodies.” I hope that she writes more about this in the future. #nudge.

Which brings me to the somewhat unique situation of Washington, DC.

Having lived in Oakland, Brooklyn and DC, I have seen patterns of similarities and differences in terms of how the city is changing demographically.

Because of the government and higher educational institutions, DC is a transient space. As people come here and leave for work for short periods, year around. A friend of mind, Mr. Miami, would routinely rent out an his extra room in his row house, for a handsome sum, for short two or three month periods twice a year in order boost his vacation savings.

Also, the district and the federal government employs a substantial number of African Americans. In fact, Prince Georges county is the seat of African American high income earners in the country.

There is a reason why Black folks, young and old joke about a “good gubmet job.”

I never really knew how Black DC government was until I went to get finger printed for a teaching job last summer. Nearly all of the employees were Black. In fact the woman, an African American woman, with a big old gun- was telling me about how much overtime she worked last week so she could take time off to be with her daughter for a summer camp performance.

The purpose of this post isn’t to go to be a five volume series on the differences of gentrification and global capitalism in three US cities, but what I am interested in is “Who Has A Right to the City?”

You will not need other ways to seduce your partner as you get enough abilities buy cialis pharmacy to perform at the peak levels which help them to attain and deliver equilibrium results. With the discount levitra use of kamagra, men from around the world. It inhibits the working of c-GMP which is the primary factor causing issues with blood flow can directly cause erection problems. cialis on line Here, you will read about some excellent attributes of useful and cheap Kamagra available for the treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder or click here for info viagra no prescription ADHD. I am invested in asking questions about the  economic power of the people who make a city work- teachers, bus drivers, subway drivers, trash collectors, maids, nannies, police officers, fire fighters and cab drivers.

What’s interesting to me about DC is the juxtaposition of Black owner occupied houses and condo’s especially near Georgia Petworth and the lack of political will to ensure that Black home owners can remain in the city.

Wouldn’t it logically follow that Black politicians in the district have a vested interest in insuring that these residents, their base, remain here, if they want to be re-elected? I am not saying that Black people automatically vote for other Black folks, some do some don’t. I am asking where is the conversation? What explains the lack of political will?

What I am saying is that the lack of a vision and a willingness to address the strong possibility that African Americans will be taxed out of their homes needs to be interrogated.

Lot’s of conversations about gentrification are ahistorical. That is because most journalist are not historians.

Think about it this way. When I was in undergrad at the New School, right up on 14th and 1st  was Stuyvesant Town.

Stuyvesant Town has 8,757 apartments in 35 residential buildings stretching from 1st to Avenue C between 14th and 23rd street. African Americans were barred from Stuyvesant Town, for the record.

As a student I was unaware of what kind of housing it was. They looked like nice projects to me.

As I got older, I learned that Stuyvesant Town was built by New York City and Metropolitan life to house WWII veterans and their families after the war.

The apartments were rented at below market rates.

This is a massive complex.

I remember reading in the paper while living in NYC in 2005, at the height of the real estate bubble that Stuyvestant town was for sale. In 2006, MetLife agreed to sell Stuyvesant Town—Peter Cooper Village to Tishman Speyer Properties and the real estate arm of BlackRock for $5.4 billion.

Because of financing issues and lawsuits Stuyvesant town ended up with creditors.

Today, Stuyvesant town is luxury apartments.

I have questions. Many questions.

Why did New York City have the political will to build Stuyvesant Town?

Given that fact that enslaved African American’s have been property historically, what does it mean that they may be taxed out of there homes in DC? Who will move in?

Should there be political will in DC to ensure that African American home owners can remain in their homes? Why? Why not?

Should people be able to afford to live in the neighborhoods where they grew up? Where they spent their 20’s?

Have African Americans earned a right to the city? If not, who does?

Are the only people who have a right to the city the ones who can afford to pay the financial price?

Mommas, Artists and Interns: All Expected to Work for Free

by

On the train a couple of weeks ago, I had an epiphany. I was tripping off of the notion of the student intern, and how that socializes young people to accept working for free.

@RafiKam and I have had several conversations on twitter about who is an artist, who should get paid to be an artist, etc.

So on the train I came to the conclusion that like mommas and interns, artists are expected to work happily for free.

Think about it. People expect artist to create websites, write articles, DJ and do God knows what else for them for free. And I understand that there always times that we do things for people on the strength, however I am talking about the assumption that because you are creative then you are happy to be exploited.

Creative people need MORE dough. We are eccentric as shit, so that tends to mean that we like nice and or absurd things. AND, all this creativity requires food and vices. Okay, not vices but defiantly food, lol. I have two empty plates of food, an empty soda can, and a half glass of coffee on my table right now. Brain cells burn twice as much energy as ALL THE other cells in the body.

More exposure for my work does not pay the cell phone bill.

When folks want cheap or free labor, where do they turn? To students. The assumption is that there are so many of them, why not pay them chump change to do entry level work?

Now Maria Mies helped me to put this all into perspective. I have had this book out, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, since September 2010 and so I am happy that I am able to write this post.

Sometimes, it may co-occur with other buy viagra cheapest illnesses like cancer, diabetes or cardiovascular diseases. A man normally wants to know, “how much is too much” is a question with an elusive answer. sildenafil 100mg canada cipla tadalafil price Of course you’ll get the best results ever in each and every person who is suffering from any sort of heart disease then he must make it a point to take appropriate medicine for this issue. Here, let us take a look at some of the buying levitra in canada common emotional causes of not being able to achieve a full, firm erection as well as delay their ejaculation during intercourse. She writes

“by defining women as housewives, a process which I then call housewifization, not only did womens unpaid work in the household become invisible, unrecorded in the GDP…but her wage work was  considered to be only supplementary to that of her husband, the so called bread-winner and thus devalued.”

We have to remember that before mass industrialization, the entire family worked to keep a house hold going. Making soap, making food, making clothes, heating lamps, building fires, all this shit took ALL DAY and a squad.

She goes on to say that there is a connection between the work that women do in the home and the ability for men to earn the cake they earn and for corporations to earn the profits they earn. She writes,

It became clear that women’s unpaid caring and nurturing work in the household was subsidizing  not only the male wage but also capital accumulation.

Which brings me to the wages that men earn and the labor situation in Wisconsin. Mies goes on to argue that what has been occurring is that men’s labor is being housewiferized. She writes,

…demonstrated that not just that housework and housewifization were models for womens labor, but that transnational capital, in its effort to break the dominance of the trade unions, and to flexiblize labor, would eventually housewifize male labor:  that is to say, men would be forced to accept labor relations which so far had been typical for women only. This means labor relations outside of the protection of labor laws, not covered by trade unions and collective bargaining, not based on a proper contract – more or less invisible, part of the ‘shadow economy.

Treating working men like women regarding wages and negotiation? How in the hell is any of this sustainable? Removing the right to collectively bargain? Treating men’s labor outside of the home, the way that women’s labor in the home is treated?

This is profound B.

Had you ever thought of the origins of the idea of the housewife?

Are you a momma, artist or intern whom people always expect to work for free?

How do you navigate or negotiate?

Capitalism is for Suckas: or, How Constructive Capitalism is our Future

by

Note: This post grew out of two things. One is a post that I wrote
last week on how the Crack Epidemic was in its essence pure capitalism
and my personal transformation from a person who wanted to be an
investment banker to someone who aspires to be a scholar and community
organizer. The second thing was a kind of crowd sourcing that happened last
week. After I wrote the post Rafi and I went back and forth on Twitter about
constructive capitalism. I suggested that we have a conversation about it.
Two people, @professorf and @chartreuseb, suggested that we continue
the conversation publicly, which would provide a transcript and give Umair
(@umairh) a chance to respond. The blog seemed like a good space to
do this, so, here it is.

Renina Jarmon: How do you expect for constructive capitalism to survive
in a system where profits at all costs have been the mandate
since the late 70’s when corporations mutated into multinationals?

But you need not worry as there is contraction of the muscles which reduces the flow viagra 20mg india pdxcommercial.com of blood in a very sufficient manner which makes the drug truly affordable for most people. These prescriptions are by no means exhaustive in scope, and advice for canadian viagra pharmacy specific cases would be myriad, if not infinite. So, you will get the same medicine of purchase generic cialis https://pdxcommercial.com/property/1135-nw-noble-drive-estacada-oregon-97023/img_5614/ with different names. The long-term effects cheap cialis pdxcommercial.com of chronic prostatitis will lead to great damage to urinary and reproductive organs in men, so the treatment is urgent once someone suffers from the disease.

Rafi Kam: First I should say that you really should do a thorough reading
of Umair’s blogs because he lays these things down every
week, I’m just going to do my best to explain what I’ve taken
away from there.
I think your question has it backwards because if you look in the
news for the past few years it’s the short term profits at all costs
approach that cannot be expected to survive. Destroying the world’s
resources only works for so long, having interests in opposition to
your customers only works for so long. Companies that don’t solve
problems or offer any real value to the world have now been paying
the price in the marketplace, and (bailouts aside!) that will continue.
Detroit failed because they ignored the fact that they needed to make
better cars and tried to make all their profits with creative financing
tricks. If they had spent the money and effort to make economical
cars to solve the world’s problem that everybody knew about decades
ago, they’d be fine right now. Instead they tried to make their business
be about financing. Ok, so good riddance Detroit! May the next
generation of American car makers hopefully learn from your mistakes.
The mortgage crisis grew out of banks screwing people. The lesson
people are beginning to learn is that this is never truly sustainable. If
your business is based on fucking over your customer you are ultimately
screwing yourself too. I mean this was particularly true with mortgages
where the stakes were so high. I expect sustainability to be the focus
for companies instead of short term profits because that is the landscape
we are looking at today. So you see a new lending model in a company
like Kiva, which is creating this healthy system of trade and tackling the
problem of global poverty. The company enables participation and
benefits on all sides instead of being there to just suck value from the
world.

And these changes in theory will come about mostly because
they are the best means to compete, as Umair says “there is nothing
more asymmetrical than an ideal” meaning having an ideal to base
your company on is actually this insanely huge business advantage.
I believe in that very strongly and we have all witnessed it in action. It
trounces our traditional notions of positioning or economic advantages.

We’ve seen in our lifetime the disruption of so many things, just in the
past ten years. So too this notion of old school capitalism. It will
change because it needs to and the shift has already started.

Renina Jarmon: I have taken the time to re-read some of Umairs posts,
The Generation M Manifesto, The Case for Constructive Capitalism,
(one of my all time fav’s) Michael Jackson and the Zombie Economy,
What Would a Fair Labor Ipod Cost and The Niche Paper Manifesto.

The central premise of capitalism is the endless accumulation of
capital, at all costs. It appears that what Umair is describing isn’t
capitalism at all.

For example, in the Generation M Manifesto, Umair says, “You wanted
to biggie size life: McMansions, Hummers, and McFood. We want
to humanize life.”

Humanizing life is antithetical to capitalism.

Capitalism turns on the expendability of workers and treating people
like property.

If he has to call it Constructive Capitalism to sell it, than I can see the
benefits of that, as I am more concerned with building local sustainable
communities than I am with arguing over the semantics of a naming of
our new economy.

I am excited that Umair is talking about a change in what institutions
value. In the the essay, “A Time to Break Silence”, Martin Luther
Kind jr. talked about the need for a radical revolution of values in
our society. Perhaps the changes he is arguing for in our institutions
will also be mirrored in us individually. The possibility for this happening
is why I write, work, and in the near future, will teach.

As a Black woman and a feminist who is interested in sustainable
economies my general contention is that the crisis that our
American institutions are facing around labor and our economy
is rooted in the United State’s primary contradiction, which is the
forced free labor of millions of enslaved Africans.

U.S. Capitalism is rooted in U.S. slavery.

It is brutal, bloody and treats workers like they are expendable,
when the workers are the ones creating value. The notion of the
founding fathers and the planter class taking what it needed, in this
case, the forced free labor of enslaved Africans, for the purpose of
sustaining a new nation, while simultaneously declaring its freedom
from Britain has never been both acknowledged and dealt with.

Perhaps the sustainable, local economies of the future can be an
opportunity to address this primary contradiction.

Renina Jarmon: What are some examples of business that employ
constructive capitalism?

Rafi Kam: As I said on Twitter, the most disruptive example is Google.
It was created to solve a pressing problem “organize the world’s information”,
it became a powerhouse of wealth because it solved another huge problem
to make advertising more relevant and accountable. This offered a solution to
a real problem for advertisers and web publishers. It stated a list of core
values about itself and how it thinks the web should work most famously
“Don’t Be Evil”.

That isn’t to say I’m comfortable with the amount of power Google has but
by stating that as their constitutional value they themselves created that
dialog/standard and asked to be judged accordingly. They’ve
stressed innovation and open-ness. Employees are required to spend
a big chunk of time creating their own projects. Google’s free APIs and
free apps have changed the game, provided a foundation for developers
and forced competitors to change their models. And referencing your
first question, quite clearly, they don’t act according to a profits at all
cost approach.

Some Umair favorites: Kiva, Etsy, Threadless, Flickr, Twitter, Netflix, Zipcar
I think there’s a connection here between Umair’s ideas on Constructive
Capitalism or Capitalism 2.0 and so many things that are currently part
of the Zeitgeist: web 2.0, open source, local farming, local economies,
purpose-driven marketing, collaboration over competition, empowering
people, small is the new big and so on. People seem more aware than
ever of how destructive business as usual is, so I think these trends
and ideas rise in response to that.

Renina Jarmon: I agree, with regard to the new companies that have come
along with a different model that acknowledges the community and
human dimension of business. I am all for artisanal, robust, sustainable,
small, if you will, slow communities.

However, if this crisis has taught us anything, it the importance of
considering the global implications of our actions.

Capital is incredibly flexible. I see that it is quite possible for our U.S.
economy to become more green, local and sustainable while the
economy of the Gobal South is turned into one populated by a
“permanent untouchables” class.

The way of life of folks in the Global North is subsidized by folks in
the Global South. While I know that you hated the video that I
sent you last April, The Story of Stuff about consumption, I found
it to be useful in demonstrating the ways in which the products
that we consume start someone where, and end up somewhere else.

What I am getting it is that it is quit possible for Capitalism 1.0 to
absorb our sustainable “Green Economy” by making it profitable
at the expense of the “Third” World.

The first example that comes to mind is the Tabacoo industry. Big
Tobacco was sued in the 80’s over whether they lied about knowing
that cigarettes was inherently addictive. In the 90’s teen anti smoking
advocates pushed for and Big Tobacco supported underwriting,
anti-teen smoking campaigns. Teen smoking went down in the US,
but it went up in Vietnam, China and arguably other places as well.

I ask you, what is to stop this from happening?
Wouldn’t businesses have to be willing to operate from a minimal
to zero profits perspective in order for this to avoid this happening?

Renina Jarmon: If as you say, we are in the beginings of a new era,
how does your notion of constructive capitalism take the fact that we
are moving towards an automated jobless society into consideration?

Rafi Kam: That’s a loaded question! I don’t know that we’re moving towards
an automated jobless society and don’t even really understand what that
means. Industries rise and fall, and automation and outsourcing have
replaced many jobs but I don’t see how we are moving to a jobless society.
It’s not cost-effective to replace every job with automation and it’s downright
impossible for some. But speaking to low-skill manufacturing or service jobs
that may have been replaced by automation, there’s different possible
answers I suppose. You have initiatives like the one Obama campaigned
on to create “green” manufacturing jobs. Ideally you’d want to see a world
where we’re creating better jobs and preparing more people for them.

But it’s sort of this two-sided thing where having a whole bunch of people
in need of jobs is a problem for society to solve and also a potential
resource for people with capital. In a perfect world you would have
someone looking at the labor pool both those ways at the same time.
Maybe that’s too optimistic. How’s that for a perfect closing line to this Q&A.

Renina Jarmon: We are in fact moving towards an automated society.
My thinking about this comes out of a reading of James Bogg’s The
American Revolution, pages from a Negro Workers Notebook. The
book, was written in 1963. His general contention is that based on
advances in technology, our society will become one in which automation
will force us to think about how to organize society based on our needs
instead of our wants. I wrote about his book in a blog post last month
titled, The Coming Jobless Society.

The notion of an automated society is a hard one to swallow, however
it is coming. For every place that you see a machine replacing a
human a job has been eliminated. The further technology advances,
the more automated our society will become, the fewer jobs will be
available. Every time you use a computer, instead of working with a human,
a process has been automated and job has been lost. For instance,
in Detroit, the assembly line was automated in the ’50’s. Our current wars are
becoming automated via unmanned land and aerial vehicles.

For the most part email has eliminated both the need for receptionists
and the USPS. Garbage trucks are automated. Pay kiosks at
businesses, such as AT&T, the grocery store, the airport and Target,
have eliminated the need for customer service agents. Where there
was once 4 human employees you only need 2, or 1.

Taking all this into consideration, I come away from this Q & A with,
in many ways trying to reconcile the world that Boggs is talking about
with the world that Umair is advocating for.