SHANGHAI — Share prices in China plunged on Friday in one of the sharpest sell-offs in years, accelerating a downturn this last week in what has been, for much of this year, the world’s best-performing stock market.
China’s two major market indexes fell in tandem. The Shanghai composite fell 7.4 percent on Friday. The Shenzhen composite fell even more, dropping 7.9 percent. Share prices in Hong Kong, which is regulated separately, also fell, by 1.8 percent.
Analysts had been warning for months about the risks of a stock market bubble in China, where giddy investors have driven up stock prices by purchasing shares on margin, or with money borrowed from brokers.
The Shanghai composite is down about 18 percent from its June high. But in Shenzhen, the so-called ChiNext, a kind of Nasdaq-style board on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange for growth stocks, has dropped about 30 percent in the last several weeks, meaning it is already technically in a bear market.
“This is not a bad thing,” Said Mr. Chi Lo, a senior economist covering greater China for BNP Paribas Investment Partners. “This is an opportunity for long-term investors to go back in. Many investors weren’t comfortable with those sky-high valuations.”
In a 2013 article, "Generalizing the core design principles for the efficacy of groups," David Wilson, Elinor Ostrom and Michael Cox recount Garrett Hardin's classic parable of the pasture overgrazed by farmers, each pursuing their own private interest by adding more cattle to their herd. Hardin's grim conclusion of a "tragedy of the commons" was shown to be avoidable by Ostrom's Nobel Prize winning research, in that, "when certain conditions are met groups of people are capable of sustainably managing their common resources [emphasis in original]."
Wilson, Ostrom and Cox go on to discuss the evolutionary salience of those eight core design principles. Incidentally, Barkley Rosser was co-editor with Wilson and John Gowdy of the supplementary issue of Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization in which the article appeared and was co-author the editorial introduction to the issue, "Rethinking economics from an evolutionary perspective." I would welcome any thoughts Barkley might have on this post.
In generalizing Ostrom's core design principles from common-pool management groups to other kinds of groups, the article makes a puzzling omission: labor unions. They specify "governments, businesses, schools, neighborhoods, and volunteer organizations," but no mention of organized labor. What makes this omission even more intriguing is that Garrett Hardin borrowed his analogy of the commons from the 19th century Oxford don, William Forster Lloyd who was using it to illustrate an argument about over-supply of the labor market and consequent unemployment and impoverishment of workers. Some Lloyd scholars have described his analysis as "proto-Marxist".
In 2010, when I was first drafting the Labor Commons Union idea, I sent a draft to Elinor Ostrom, who replied, "thanks -- had not thought about labor as a common pool that could be exhausted but now I see the similarity with resources." Paul Burkett had also seen the similarity and argued, in Marx and Nature: A Red Green Perspective, that Marx had treated labor power as a common-pool resource although he hadn't used that terminology.
So, if labor power is indeed a common-pool resource as Burkett and I argue and as Ostrom briefly acknowledged, it would seem that a common-pool resource management strategy would be more appropriate than a wages-rut system for establishing equitable compensation of labor. By the same token, the design principles identified by Ostrom and discussed in the paper by Wilson, Ostrom and Cox would be especially compelling.
Another evil of the robot is the ill-will it begets between the masters and the workmen: their whole lives seem to be a constant effort, on the one hand, to see how much can be pressed out of the reluctant peasant; and, on the other, how little can be done to satisfy the terms of agreement, and escape punishment. Mutual injury becomes a mutual profit; suspicion and ill-will are the natural results. -- John Paget. Hungary and Transylvania: with remarks on their condition, social, political and economical, Volume 1, 1839.
The "robot" referred to in the preceding paragraph was not a mechanical man or other device but a system of labor rent that existed under serfdom in central Europe.
From Russian работа (rabóta), from Proto-Slavic *orbota (“hard work, slavery”) derived from *orbь (“slave”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *orbh- (“to change or evolve status”), the predecessor to *h₃órbʰos (“orphan”). Cognate with German Arbeit and Dutch arbeid.
Today, June 27, is the 150th anniversary of Karl Marx's declaration that workers "ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: 'Abolition of the wages system!'"
Sandwichman's effort to celebrate and revive this declaration has met with incomprehension in some quarters:
"How do you abolish the wages system by degrees?"
"And how would that work?"
"...there might be an interesting argument here, but I cannot understand what it is."
It is beginning to dawn on me that the euphemism "wages system" is a red herring that has been throwing people off the scent. Joan Robinson once famously wisecracked, "The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all."
Sadly, Robinson neglected to clarify that the latter kind of misery was a prerequisite for the former. This was something Karl Marx had described long ago as comprising the "great beauty of capitalist production" -- "that it not only constantly reproduces the wage-worker as wage-worker, but produces always, in proportion to the accumulation of capital, a relative surplus population of wage-workers."
It is as a consequence of this relative surplus of wage workers that "the law of supply and demand of labour is kept in the right rut, the oscillation of wages is penned within limits satisfactory to capitalist exploitation." Thus it would be more accurate to call the wages system of capitalism the "wages-rut system."
But I find it increasingly difficult to motivate such an exposition. However dissatisfied people may be with the effects of the wages-rut system, there seems to be a singular lack of interest in doing anything about the causes of those effects or perhaps a conviction that nothing can be done. I'm not here to exhort people to "do something!" or to persuade them that there is a possibility of doing something.
Part of my disdain for such cheerleading has to do with what used to be known as "the conjuncture". Observing current events, I am afraid that it is too late to speak of abolishing the wages-rut system. Capitalist production is no longer "beautiful" enough to produce a surplus population adequate to the exponentially-expanding accumulation needs of finance capital. A deeper rut must be imposed by fiat by the central authorities. In essence, this is a return to the labor rent system of feudalism -- the robot. The "euthanasia of the rentier" has been overtaken by the erection of a monstrous life-support system for finance capital.
...how to keep the floating carcass of a crazy and diseased finance capital, betwixt wind and water, swimming still upon her own dead lees, that now is the deep design of a central banker!
I had a friend who wanted to drive a Mercedes-Benz. His reasoning was that rich people drove Mercedes, so if he drove one, people would think he was rich and would make deals with him to make him rich. I am sure there are examples of this strategy succeeding. And many, many more examples of it failing.
John Quiggin has posted a draft statement of principles for a People's Economic Alternative, endorsed by around 20 Australian unions and community groups. Principle number one is "Economic growth is not an end in itself, but is a means to better the lives of the Australian people, including future generations." Who could object to that?
Is economic growth a means to better the lives of people? Show me the evidence. And, no, I don't mean correlations. Correlation does not imply causality. Just because living standards have improved (from a particular perspective) in an era where there has been economic growth doesn't mean the growth has caused the improvement in living standards.
There appears to be a rule in economics that if you ignore a refutation long enough, it goes away. If that doesn't work, knock down a straw man caricature of the critique and that'll proves your point. A logical fallacy becomes a self-evident truth if repeated stubbornly enough.
Principle number one takes an imaginary step forward in acknowledging that economic growth ought not to be an end in itself. But you know what? NOBODY says economic growth is an end in itself. Nobody markets their beer on the promise that if you drink lots of it you'll get drunk. I've seen the ads. Growth puts smiles on the faces of young children. It makes the sun shine brighter.
In short, principle number one of the People's Economic Alternative affirms the conventional dogma as a self-evident truth. What is alternative about that?
Instead of the conservative slogan, “Economic growth is a means to better the lives of the Australian people, including future generations…” a people’s movement should inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the growth imperative!”
Derek Thompson has a feature (slathered with Shell ads) at the Atlantic Monthly this month, once again traversing the well-trodden territory of the alleged Luddite/lump-of-labor fallacy (see also Foreign Affairs "Will Humans Go the Way of Horses"):
The end-of-work argument has often been dismissed as the “Luddite fallacy,” an allusion to the 19th-century British brutes who smashed textile-making machines at the dawn of the industrial revolution, fearing the machines would put hand-weavers out of work.
Thompson's take on the "boy who cried robot" fable is that this time -- perhaps, after so many false alarms -- the wolfish robot really is at the door. Overall, aside from referring to rioting 19th century laborers as "brutes," it's not such a bad survey of views on the issue -- citing Sandwich-pals, Robert Skidelsky, Ben Hunnicutt and Peter Frase, among others.
But Thompson's excursion takes a weird detour when he asserts that Skidelsky's, Hunnicutt's and Frase's vision of a post-work society is "problematic" because "it doesn’t resemble the world as it is currently experienced by most jobless people." WTF? Proposals for change are invalidated by their lack of conformity to the status quo? Night cannot follow day because it is dark and day is light? Different is impossible because it is not the same?
Thompson then devotes several paragraphs to rounding up the usual suspects of what might be termed as post-work work: 3-D printing, maker spaces and the internet enabled "sharing" economy of Ubers and Task Rabbits. After rambling on discursively for a few thousand more words, Thompson winds up back in Youngstown, Ohio, where his essay started, with the story of Howard Jesko, a 60-year old graduate student:
If Jesko had taken a job in the steel industry, he might be preparing for retirement today. Instead, that industry collapsed and then, years later, another recession struck. The outcome of this cumulative grief is that Howard Jesko is not retiring at 60. He’s getting his master’s degree to become a teacher. It took the loss of so many jobs to force him to pursue the work he always wanted to do.
And they all lived happily ever after! I suppose that's how you sell a story to the Atlantic Monthly.
Don't get me wrong. It's nice that Howard Jesko will get to pursue work he always wanted to do. I got to teach university at age 64 after working as a clerk in a grocery store for six years. My point though, is that Howard Jesko's happy ending is... not uh... statistically significant. I mean it is not even illustrative of any findings of any research, qualitative or quantitative. It is a weightless anecdote plucked out of thin air. Very thin air. A vacuum.
Besides, seeing all those Shell ads juxtaposed with the article kept depletion of cheap fossil fuel resources and climate change on my mind.
May I let you in on a secret? We're not hurtling inexorably toward a comedic denouement. That's fantasy. Wishful thinking. The Sandwichman offers abolition of the wages system and reduction of working time as harm reduction strategies, not as miracle cures. Got that? Harm reduction. Gonna be a world of hurt.
When the fossil interlude comes to an end, propping up the illusion of perpetual, exponentially-increasing prosperity won't be worth the bother. It will only annoy the pigs you are trying to teach to sing. It is not that there is "only so much work to go round." There are only so many cheap, readily-accessible material resources at hand to work with. Working, it turns out is always working with.
Lionel Robbins famously defined economics as "the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between given ends and scarce means which have alternative uses." One may quarrel with Robbins's ghost about whether that is what economics ought to study but it must be admitted that the concept of scarcity plays a minor role in contemporary economics discourse. Scarcity has become a side-show that is presumably always solvable by substitution. There is even a "built-in mechanism" that makes it so! In truth, though, there is no built-in mechanism to substitute happy endings for the exhaustion scarce means. When the junk is gone, the party is over.
Ending? Yes. Happy? Not so much.
Back in the 1960s an anthropologist named George Foster studying the peasants of Tzintzuntzan, Mexico, wrote that those peasants had the foolish notion that there was only a limited amount of good in the world. If one person got more land or water or crop yield or conjugal bliss then somebody else would have to suffer with less. A zero-sum game. Foster thought this was an outmoded idea that had to be dispelled so people could enjoy the boundless booty of modern technology.
Foster's hypothesis was popular for a while in anthropology but also controversial. Eventually its prestige faded. In "Revisiting the Image of Limited Good: On Sustainability, Thermodynamics, and the Illusion of Creating Wealth," Paul Trawick and Alf Hornborg have revived the concept of the image of limited good but with a twist. The peasants were right and Foster was wrong.
In their essay, Trawick and Hornborg contrasted real wealth and virtual wealth, arguing that what grows are claims on real wealth generated by the expansion of credit. Meeting those claims necessarily involves the destruction of natural resources in the course of converting them into commodities with exchange value. An increase in exchange value thus always entails an increase in entropy -- that is, a decrease in available energy. The amount (or intensity) of this increase in entropy can be modified by technological efficiency improvements but its direction remains unchanged. "Real wealth, unlike its virtual counterpart, is something that human beings do not and cannot create in godlike fashion the way they create ideas and symbolic phenomena such as value."
This strikes at the heart what seems to be an unshakeable article of faith among economists. The economy can grow because value doesn't have to consist of stuff. Well, yeah, value isn't stuff. So what? The creation of value is the creation of claims that may be redeemed for stuff.
I give you a massage so I can buy a steak with the money you give me. The value of the service is only immaterial when viewed in isolation from my motivation for performing it. No beef, no rub. This is the distinction between real wealth and virtual wealth that economists seem incapable of grasping. Virtual wealth is indeed virtually immaterial -- until the claims that arise from that virtual wealth are redeemed. If those claims are not redeemable for real wealth, they are worthless.
"The idea that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African-Americans is what made the United States powerful and rich is not an idea that people necessarily are happy to hear. Yet it is the truth." -- Edward Baptist,The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
Marx's "revolutionary watchword," abolition of the wages system, plays on analogy and allusion. The allusion to wages slavery as analogous to chattel slavery was a commonplace in both pro-slavery and anti-slavery rhetoric in 1840s America:
How much better than slaves are laborers forced by the lash of hunger to toil for the mere minimum of human subsistence? And what right has England to read us a lecture on slavery? Let her look at home. The great mass of her population are reduced to a state of moral and physical degradation unknown in any other European country.
Orestes A. "Lash" Brownson
This metaphorical "lash of hunger" appeared in a disingenuous tract by Orestes A. Brownson who professed to despise slavery but maintained that Secretary of State John C. Calhoun's justification of it, in an official letter to British ambassador Richard Pakenham, was not a defense of slavery, "it is said Mr. Calhoun entered into a defence of slavery. He did no such thing. He offers in his letter not one word in defence of slavery."
In truth, Calhoun's infamous letter offered not one but 2,259 words in defence of slavery -- including explicit, albeit diplomatic hints of war arising from the United States' "sacred obligation" to defend and protect slavery as "a political institution, essential to the peace, safety, and prosperity of those States of the Union in which it exists."
Theodore Sedgwick, writing under the pseudonym of "Veto" in the New York Evening Post, offered this less "nuanced" interpretation of the Calhoun letter:
It is evident that this presents to the people of the Union a question entirely new and which they cannot avoid. This issue is not as to abolition of slavery in the southern States, the District, nor the Territories of the Union, but whether this government shall devote its whole energies to the perpetuation of slavery; whether all the sister republics on this continent which desire to abolish slavery, are to be dragooned by us into the support of this institution.... Hitherto the watch-word has been non-intervention in the domestic affairs of the South. Now it is intervention with foreign nations to protect, extend and perpetuate those institutions.
At the other end of the spectrum from Brownson and Calhoun, Free Soil (later Republican) Congressman George Washington Julian of Indiana offered the following rationale for the Homestead Bill in 1847:
The freedom of the public lands is therefore an anti-slavery measure. It will weaken the slave power by lending the official sanction of the Government to the natural right of man, as man, to a home upon the soil, and of course to the fruits of his own labor. It will weaken the system of chattel slavery, by making war upon its kindred system of wages slavery, giving homes and employment to its victims, and equalizing the condition of the people.
George Washington Julian
In a later speech to the Indiana state convention of the Free Soil Party (1853), Julian took note of the hypocrisy of pro-slavery politicians justifying their "peculiar institution" on the grounds of the social evils of the wages system:
Such an argument in defense of slavery is infamous, besides being the baldest sophistry. The free States do not justify the social evils that have grown up in their midst. They do not cling to them as to the corner-stone of the Republic. They do not invoke in their behalf the divine sanction, nor threaten to dissolve the Union if they should be abolished. It is especially true of anti-slavery men, that whilst they wage war against chattel slavery in the South, they wage war against wages slavery in the North (emphasis added).
The "lash of hunger" is a metaphor. But is the "kindred system of wages slavery" really an analogy? After all, as the Sandwichman reported previously, Simon Kuznets warned against the dangers of analogy, citing Sidney Hook as authoritative. For his part, Hook scorned analogies as "formally worthless and never logically compelling."
Analogy? What analogy? The cotton picked by slaves in the South was not "similar" to the cotton subsequently spun and woven in Manchester with the aid of steam-powered machinery. It was the same cotton. Alf Hornborg has documented that "investments in steam technology in nineteenth-century Britain, for instance, were indissolubly connected to the Atlantic slave trade and the cotton plantations in the American South":
"...capital, however much it tries, will never be able to ‘delink’ itself from labor and land. The rationale of machine technology is to (locally) save or liberate time and space, but (crucially) at the expense of time and space consumed elsewhere in the social system."
Chattel slavery and the wages system were thus constituent parts of a single, vertically integrated production process -- cogs in the same machine, so to speak! And speaking of machines... in a more recent book chapter, "The Fossil Interlude," Hornborg referred to the notion of "energy slaves" as "more than a metaphor."
If the category 'slavery' is defined not primarily in terms of being victims of immediate violence, but more fundamentally in terms of being coerced to perform alienating, low-status tasks for the benefit of a privileged elite, a significant part of the world’s population would qualify as slaves. Seemingly neutral concepts such as 'technology' and the 'world market' organize the transfer of their embodied labour and resources to an affluent minority. From this perspective, the operation of technology represents the deflected agency (the labour energy) of uncounted millions of labourers, harnessed for the service of a global elite.
Machinery, in Hornborg's view doesn't simply enhance the productivity of the laborer using the machine. It does so by displacing a great deal of the work time and effort to someplace else where it can be performed more cheaply and invisibly. The beneficiaries of this unequal exchange have failed to discern that what they enjoy as a gain is actually an inequitable distribution of costs and benefits. Resource exhaustion and constraints from climate change make the sustainability of this illusion doubtful.
What happens, then, when the wages system -- temporarily spared the lash of hunger through its insatiable consumption of fossil fuel and displacement of "degrading, low wage toil" to an out-of-sight, out-of-mind periphery -- runs out of cheap fuel to power the displacing machinery? Will we see a return to the metaphorical lash of hunger or to the overseers' actual lash? Or perhaps some combination of the two?
If people are not happy to hear that slavery is what made the U.S. rich and powerful, they'll be choked to find out it wasn't a one-shot, lasts-forever deal.
From Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ of the Holy Father Francis, On Care For Our Common Home:
The basic problem goes even deeper: it is the way that humanity has taken up technology and its development according to an undifferentiated and one-dimensional paradigm. This paradigm exalts the concept of a subject who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object. This subject makes every effort to establish the scientific and experimental method, which in itself is already a technique of possession, mastery and transformation. It is as if the subject were to find itself in the presence of something formless, completely open to manipulation. Men and women have constantly intervened in nature, but for a long time this meant being in tune with and respecting the possibilities offered by the things themselves. It was a matter of receiving what nature itself allowed, as if from its own hand. Now, by contrast, we are the ones to lay our hands on things, attempting to extract everything possible from them while frequently ignoring or forgetting the reality in front of us. Human beings and material objects no longer extend a friendly hand to one another; the relationship has become confrontational. This has made it easy to accept the idea of infinite or unlimited growth, which proves so attractive to economists, financiers and experts in technology. It is based on the lie that there is an infinite supply of the earth’s goods, and this leads to the planet being squeezed dry beyond every limit. It is the false notion that “an infinite quantity of energy and resources are available, that it is possible to renew them quickly, and that the negative effects of the exploitation of the natural order can be easily absorbed”
"The technocratic paradigm also tends to dominate economic and political life. The economy accepts every advance in technology with a view to profit, without concern for its potentially negative impact on human beings. Finance overwhelms the real economy. The lessons of the global financial crisis have not been assimilated, and we are learning all too slowly the lessons of environmental deterioration. Some circles maintain that current economics and technology will solve all environmental problems, and argue, in popular and non-technical terms, that the problems of global hunger and poverty will be resolved simply by market growth. They are less concerned with certain economic theories which today scarcely anybody dares defend, than with their actual operation in the functioning of the economy. They may not affirm such theories with words, but nonetheless support them with their deeds by showing no interest in more balanced levels of production, a better distribution of wealth, concern for the environment and the rights of future generations. Their behaviour shows that for them maximizing profits is enough. Yet by itself the market cannot guarantee integral human development and social inclusion. At the same time, we have “a sort of ‘superdevelopment’ of a wasteful and consumerist kind which forms an unacceptable contrast with the ongoing situations of dehumanizing deprivation”, while we are all too slow in developing economic institutions and social initiatives which can give the poor regular access to basic resources. We fail to see the deepest roots of our present failures, which have to do with the direction, goals, meaning and social implications of technological and economic growth.”
On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee conceded, “[T]here is nothing left for me to do but go and see General Grant.” The Confederate Army surrendered, and Dixie, the Confederate battle flag, ceased to fly. But only temporarily. In 1956, for the first time in nearly a century, Georgia resurrected the Confederate symbol by changing its state flag in symbolic opposition to Brown v. Board of Education. South Carolina followed suit six years later, hoisting the flag above its state capitol. The following year, Alabama revived Dixie, with Governor George Wallace raising the flag as part of his “Segregation Forever” campaign. Brown is still the law of the land, yet Dixie remains entrenched.
Last year, in NAACP v. Hunt, the Eleventh Circuit rejected the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) claim that the Constitution of the United States and federal statutes mandate the removal of the flag from the Alabama state capitol. Central to the court’s conclusion was the notion that the Hunt plaintiffs’ problem involved neither the flag nor the law, but their “own emotions.” Moreover, the court held that “[t]here is no unequal application of the state policy; all citizens are exposed to the flag. Citizens of all races are offended by its position.” In sum, the court told the plaintiffs to turn elsewhere for relief, because “the federal judiciary is not empowered to make decisions based on social sensitivity.”
This Note takes issue with the Hunt court. It proceeds in two parts. Part I argues that the Alabama government’s flying of the rebel flag violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because the flag was raised with the intent to discriminate against blacks. Part II argues that flying the flag violates the First Amendment because it is a form of racist government speech that chills the speech rights of blacks.
Barkley Rosser, who is beardless (but not goatee-less) thinks I’m the victim of small sample bias. Paul Krugman, whose whiskers are iconic, says its because economists’ careers outrace their maturation. I say its Krugman who’s locked into a small, unrepresentative sample.
On the few occasions I sit down with economists like me (whose careers never took off or did so in unconventional ways), the men mostly do have beards. Granted, we are another small sample. I think it may have something to do with being in an in-between state, drawn in one direction to social science, political dissidence or a bit of bohemianism, and to an aura of techie-ness and familiarity with the norms of money and business in the other. A neatly trimmed beard cuts right down the middle.
But if this is worth thinking about, and if anyone actually cares, it’s worth serious empirical investigation—at the very least, an AEA survey like the ones that periodically show up in your inbox if you’re a member of this particular cult.
So, I am going to propose that in addition to his clearly stated white supremacist racism and desire for race war to erupt as a result of his shootings in the Emmanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, the possibly drug-crazed shooter may also have had a more specific goal, even if it was just secondary to his broader desire for a race war. That he had very carefully selected his main target, the Rev. Pinckney of that church. So, rather than being some sort of random "domestic terrorism" or just generally insane shooting up some movie theater audience, he had targeted this particular man in this particular church. After all, he supposedly had been plotting something along these lines for at least six months.
It now appears that Rev. Pinckney may have been the leading political figure of the entire South Carolina African-American community. He had served in the state senate for 15 years, and he had just gotten a lot of publicity for an eloquent speech made in the wake of the shooting in the back of a black man in North Charleston by a policeman. Roof was known to have ranted about Trayvon Martin and other such cases, so one can imagine that this particular case where pretty much even the usual defenders of white police killing black people were appalled and said that this cop should go would have upset our Mr. Roof. One can imagine that his obsessions and hatred could easily have focused on this eloquent speaker and leader, minister at a famous and historic black church.
Now, it is possible that Roof really did not know whom he was shooting other than that they were a bunch of black people in a Bible study group in a church. But, although it cannot be proven, and as I admit, he has not been reported to have made any remarks about Pinckney, it is highly likely that he knew exactly whom he was shooting and who was leading that Bible study group. It is curious that there is a report that he hesitated, due to their being "so nice" to him. That family members of some of the victims have forgiven him says a very great deal.
But, I think that we should consider it likely that this was a targeted political assassination, in addition to all the other things it is or has been.
Step one: Do not forget. Marx advised not to forget that in everyday struggles you are fighting with effects, not with the causes of those effects. Not forgetting requires a lot of attention to history. It also requires a keen awareness that there is a well-funded industry devoted to making us forget. Step two: Our own accounting. Standard double-entry bookkeeping looks at profit and loss from the perspective of the business enterprise whose purpose is defined as monetary profit seeking. Making a profit is not the purpose of people or of nations. Labor is not a commodity. Labor power is a common-pool resource. Step three: Build (or transform) organizations dedicated to not forgetting and our own accounting. The model for this is a hybrid that borrows both from traditional trade unionism and from common-pool resource management. The precedents are there. What needs to be done is to synthesize from those experiences. Step four: Bargain collectively. Collective bargaining is not synonymous with the administrative model of bargaining established under the Wagner Act. Eric Hobsbawm, for example, called the Luddite actions "collective bargaining by riot." Theodore Ave-Lallemant wrote an obscure article nearly a hundred years ago in which he distinguished between the collective labor contract based on cooperation and the more standard form of contract bargaining which "seeks no more than to stipulate the terms of individual contracts of employment." Step five: Work less. The wages system is effectively abolished in each hour workers collectively withdraw from the labor supply. Limitation of the hours of work is abolition of the wages system by degree. This explains why employers have fought so tenaciously for two centuries against the reduction of working time.
