By: Stephen

Stephen — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 04:27:01 +0000

Dude, that was an awesome comment. Actually made me sit and think about my life and priorities. If only people read our blog, because they should hear that.

By: eli

eli — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 17:18:47 +0000

Yes, I’m glad you posted about this article, because I was about to do so also. (I like that you gave a shout out to our homie Vijay who had a beautiful wedding this weekend. I was truly humbled and touched by how loving his family and friends are with each other. He and his ‘wifey’ (who is very cool herself) are already wealthy beyond measure thanks to their strong and healthy social network. I see a stark contrast between the deep, socially embedded happiness of our newly wedded friends and the superficial wealth of these anxious, rat-racing millionaires. My following comment is inspired by this contrast…) I like that you made the connection with class politics, and I think you’re right to be offended by their calling these “whiney assholes” part of the working class. But I’ll take your argument even further and say that it might not be helpful to see them as part of the bourgeois class either. In fact, given the changes in the dominant mode of production from industrial to immaterial labor (”immaterial”=information, communication, affect (including service)), the proletariat vs. bourgeois dichotomoy is not the appropropriate way for progressives to conceptualize class politics anymore (BTW, I’m drawing here on Empire and Multitude by Hardt and Negri). This article presents an excellent example of why not. These millionaires are working their asses off just like most other Americans, and they’re getting exploited just like other Americans. However, it’s hard to see how they are being exploited when we think of them as rich millionaires, because on the old view of exploitation, the bourgeoisie (capitalists) appropriate the surplus value produced by the workers (where surplus value is the value of the products produced by workers beyond their basic needs for living and reproduction - for a clear explanation of this, see Marx’s speech, “value, price, and profit”). In the old, industrial paradigm of production, value could be measured in terms of quantities of material products corresponding to quantities of labor devoted to their production. But in the new paradigm of production, value becomes immeasurable, because the products of labor are immaterial (communication, information, and affective and social relationships). In terms of these new sources of value, these millionaires in the NYT story are still getting exploited, despite the material wealth they have reaped from the internet boom. The labor that they have put into producing software or internet companies has given them lots of money relative to the rest of the world, but this money does not bring them happiness because money is not an appropriate measure of value anymore. You can’t put a price on good social knowledge and on healthy affective relationships with not only your friends and family but especially the rest of the world (e.g., can you put a price on the feeling of security that Americans could gain from healthy, peaceful social relationships with the persons in the global south who are now villified as ‘terrorists’?). You can see how these millionaires are still being exploited if you conceive of exploitation in terms of the expropriation of the common knowledge, information, and communication that they are producing. Who then is expropriating this common? Not one particular person but a political-economic system of capitalism and non-democratic politics, through which the creative energies of working people are wasted on the production and consumption of shit that people don’t really need (McMansions, cars, designer clothes, Coke-a-Cola, sitcoms, etc.). These whiney millionaires are caught up in this system of exploitation too, because even though they are at the top of the heap of creative production of the immaterial common (directly producing software and internet technologies), they are still allowing their products to be submitted to the competition of the ‘world market,’ and thereby they lose the potential to have democratic control over what is done with the common. They are being tricked by many ideologies into allowing themselves to be exploited in this way, and the NYT article points to some of these: the achievement ideology (”Silicon Valley offers an unusual twist on keeping up with the Joneses. The venture capitalist two doors down might own a Cessna Citation X private jet. The father of your 8-year-old’s best friend, who has not worked for two years, drives a bright yellow Ferrari. Temptations loom everywhere.”), along with the fetishization of commodities and conspicuous consumption (what Steve refers to as “affluenza”), and the ideology of competition for educational opportunities (e.g., paying a lot more for a house in an area with good schools). All of these ideologies are premised on a view that we are in competition with each other for a limited amount of value. That’s simply wrong. Value is now limitless - the value of social knowledge and relationships is infinite. If these millionaires and all of us could realize this, they and we would see that we can stop competing with each other over something for which their is enough to share with all, and that instead we should start cooperating with each other and start talking about how best to democratically organize the flows of communication, knowledge, and people throughout the world.

Comments on: The Laments of the Privileged

By: Stephen

By: eli