Labor and Innovation

This passage from a fascinating piece by Gavin Mueller at Jacobin encapsulates the questions and contradictions facing labor today:

"I think it’s a mistake to celebrate automation, a process which has such a devastating effect on the working class. Instead, we should encourage people to oppose the technologies they rightly see as threatening their existence, whether it’s academics being proletarianized by MOOCs, truckers threatened by Google’s smart cars, DJs made obsolete by Pandora algorithms, or even our savvy longshoremen, who are being forced to give up those hard-won benefits (and who are currently accused by management of engaging in some machine-breaking of their own). 

Here’s a post-work imaginary for you. What if, instead of depending on capitalism to give us all the machines we need for a socialism without scarcity or drudgery, we put the installation of technology on hold until “after the revolution”? Under socialism, automation processes could be guided, controlled, and implemented by workers themselves, in ways that would improve their lives without destroying their communities. Socialism, not capitalism, will get kids out of the mines and away from the drive-through window. And we can’t create that future until we stop the present."

First, let me briefly indulge my neoliberal sellout side by observing that MOOCs, smart cars, Pandora, and so forth represent genuine improvements in the lived experience of humans who use them. Above and beyond any quantifiable added economic value which we might measure, having access to these goods is an objective victory for human welfare.* That fact needs to be acknowledged, and by failing to do so, Mueller's argument opens itself up to a litany of trivial, fish-in-a-barrel reductios: should we oppose Wikipedia for the threat it poses to professional encyclopedia writers? What about opposing the printing press for the threat it posed to professional scribes? There needs to be some recognition of the concept that innovation creates societal value (a regrettably clinical term for a warmly humanist concept) which should, to the furthest extent possible, be considered independently from its near-term negative effects on displaced workers.

Nevertheless, pointing to societal value, particularly "long-term" societal value, is cold comfort to a trucker newly replaced by a Google computer, and rightly so. Given the short time scales in which we find ourselves able to seek out happiness and human fulfillment, it's not at all incorrect to say that the rise of smart cars will impose very real misery on a broad swathe of people even as it creates wondrous and undeniable happiness elsewhere. It may very well be rational, then, for a given trucker or truckers as a class to follow Mueller's advice and vehemently oppose the implementation of smart cars, to the extent that such opposition is actually effective in the short run.

We thus have two contradictory effects of disruptive innovation:

(a) the marvelous society-wide value it creates;
(b) the limited, short-term, but undeniably disastrous suffering it tends to impose on specific classes of people. 

(a) is adulterated and rendered hollow by (b), while the results of (b) act to constrict (a) because rational actors affected by (b) will resist innovation to the extent possible. A response to disruptive innovation should accept and attempt to resolve this tension. What Mueller gets right is the crucial role of an empowered, united labor movement in creating that response. What he gets wrong is what the response should be.

Consider his several historical examples of broadly Luddite actions undertaken by workers:

Marx documents how in the seventeenth century, machines like looms and mills were often banned because their introduction caused such social upheaval that it spooked those in power (in one case, the inventor of a mechanized loom was assassinated by nervous authorities). By the nineteenth century, once capital had gained the upper hand, workers repeatedly assaulted the machines that had become instruments of violence against them. When destruction wasn’t on the table, workers quit in droves. The introduction of the assembly line in 1913 caused mass desertion in plants owned by Henry Ford, who had to scramble to deal with an astonishing 380 percent employee turnover rate. Waves of worker revolts in the 1960s and 1970s struck at the instruments of production. In 1975, a gang of pressmen at the Washington Post held their foreman hostage while they meticulously destroyed and burned the computerized press that had just made them obsolete.

Mueller seems to use these actions as useful examples for modern-day labor to follow. What he evidently neglects in doing so is that each of these initiatives were obvious and unmitigated failures. While it's debatable whether the workers' actions were actively counterproductive to their own interests, they certainly weren't effective: the looms, assembly lines, and computerized printing presses thrummed on apace. The Luddites, famously, failed; but Mueller's prescription is for more of the same. He wants workers to rage ineffectually against innovation until the "revolution" descends, ex machina, to save the day. He wants to minimize (b) by constraining (a) in the hopes that the conflict will resolve itself on its own. 

The appropriate response, in contrast, should be blindingly clear: We need to maximize (a) by minimizing (b), which means shifting the calculus of threatened workers so that it's not rational for them to attempt to halt innovation. How? I'd start with the following: 

1. An empowered labor movement that can both wrest the surplus economic value of innovation away from capital and improve the experience of workers in less strictly monetary ways, such as workplace conditions and increased guidance over corporate decision-making.
2. Aggressively redistributionist taxation and a robust regulatory regime to supplement labor in accomplishing the goals of (1).
3. A strong welfare state to serve as a bulwark against near-term unemployment and poverty caused by innovation.
4. A well-equipped, forward-looking public sector that works to create long-term societal prosperity in the ways markets are ill-equipped to accomplish, such as through education, physical infrastructure, scientific research, and funding of the arts.

Clearly the above agenda lies somewhere on a continuum between socialism, social democracy, and capitalism**; exactly where you place it depends on your ideological cant. Equally clearly, the above is not revolutionary in a meaningful sense with respect to the current situation in the United States--arguably, we had a fair if flawed approximation of it in the touted postwar golden age, and few would label the pre-1973 U.S. anything but a capitalist society. But I think a society in which the above were present would meaningfully fulfill Mueller's desire for a system in which "automation processes could be guided, controlled, and implemented by workers themselves, in ways that would improve their lives without destroying their communities" without requiring a wave of Mueller's magic revolution wand.



*Note that the point is not that the new technology is necessarily an unadulterated improvement over the displaced one. To take one example, few would say that Pandora is a strict improvement over a DJ. It's just that having access to Pandora or a DJ is a strict improvement over having access only to a DJ, just as the invention of recording represented a strict improvement over needing to rely on expensive live performers to hear music. I'll anticipate the obvious objection: to the extent that Pandora reduces access to DJs, such as by degrading the status of DJing as a culturally relevant occupation, that's an indication that on a society-wide level people actually do prefer Pandora to a DJ. 

**To anticipate an objection to this framing, I note that the often-invoked distinction between economic systems and systems of governance is deeply problematic--arguably, by ignoring the inescapable role of government in the economy, such a distinction reinforces the intellectually barren concept of the free market. An economic system does not exist independent of a political context, and vice versa.