Left Forum

This past weekend, the Left Forum was once again held in NYC's Pace University. An exciting year, because of the energy injected into Left thought & movement by Occupy Wall Street. I was there mostly in work capacity, attending panels on health care and tabling for PNHP. I did go to a couple of other panels though, including two with Stanley Aronowitz, who has become a real mentor of mine. One was on the Jobless Future problem: we are tending to become a society in which there is plenty of employment, but no jobs (jobs understood as having high wages, stable hours and working conditions, ample benefits including livable pension, and job security). The days of union jobs in stable, continuous operations like manufacturing are gone. Temporary, part-time, contracted, precarious work is the new normal.

A person's "career" in just about any professional area is increasingly a never-ending series of internships (often unpaid) and contract & freelance work. Microsoft gives its corporate/tech hires a choice: take lower wages in exchange for steady (eg W2) employment, or get paid more but work under short-term contract (eg 1099). With costs of living (housing, food, education) on the rise, is it any wonder that people increasingly choose the higher income model? Fully half of Microsoft corporate workers are contracted -- no job security, no long-term benefits. The same is true of blue-collar work -- as union density erodes and manufacturing disappears or becomes non-union, job security in any job shall have been a thing of the past.

What does this all mean? The jobless future is not a future without work -- there will still be plenty of that -- but rather a future of work without end, in which we cobble together a living with multiple part-time and temporary jobs with no hope of retiring much less having health-care or other needs provided for. People like my parents, who have worked "steady," professional jobs for most of their lives, see retirement in jeopardy as pensions suffer on the marketplace and costs of things like medical care skyrocket (more than half of all personal bankruptcies are due to medical bills). Unemployment or under-employment will become the new normal (forget what I just said about there being "plenty" of work; profit-generating surplus value -- which capital accumulation relies on and is driven by -- is increasingly extracted not from human labor, but from credit/debt models, obviating some of the need for a worker society. The formation of consumer society is a topic for another essay).

So not only will there be no end to the work day or work week as we are forced to take on more and more work to keep up will falling wages and increasing costs, there will be no end to the work life. And we find ourselves back in the days of endless work, basically from birth until early death. This is the life of children who worked a century ago in coal mines, or in today's garment sweatshops, or of the slaves on American plantations. What opportunities will there be to develop intellectual, cultural, artistic values and competencies? This is a future that, while likely, I'm not willing to accept as inevitable (see previous post -- we can note tendencies like the jobless future, but we can't guarantee them). Daily life is a complicated, compromised, and frankly misunderstood phenomenon, and we had better think carefully about its makeup, especially its relationship to work.

Negative Evolution

Duration is lived experience. Time, as we know it, is an artifice -- an attempt by the perceiving mind to order experience according to utility. We think of time in terms of what we can do with it. Thus we carve up our lives into years, days, hours, minutes, and seconds, vainly attempting to impose finite, metric order upon infinite duration. Nevertheless, spacetime is in constant motion, and the accumulation of that duration, what we call the past, both constitutes and eats into the present. Duration is therefore a creative process, constantly producing the past, present, and future, not to mention evolutionary movement.

These are precepts of Henri Bergson's philosophy, as laid out in Creative Evolution (1907). To make an argument here, I would need to go into much deeper detail, but I want to sketch out a critique (which I'm sure has been made many times since Bergson's argument appeared): is development always positive?

For Bergson, duration is always a creative process that, like a snowball rolling down a hill, accumulates more and more as it moves: more life, more experience, more emotion, more energy, and so forth. He is critical of the so-called "life-sciences," which he argues are only capable of examining the ways in which energy wastes away -- death processes -- rather than truly generative phenomena, such as evolution.

But surely there is a moment for negation? Bergson is not a dialectician, and it shows -- for Hegel, writing a century earlier, there was no movement without the negative. Things only emerge or move that have tarried with and incorporated the negative, through a dialectical process of development. Bergson seems to do away with the negative, as if all development were positive, just experience accumulating upon experience, not toward anything necessarily (he critiqued teleological "finalism"), but nevertheless forward.

Contemporaries of Bergson, most notably Nietzsche, would argue for the possibility (even necessity) of negative development. Not every step is a step forward. History moves, but is it always moving forward? Surely there is a role for retrogression, as well as progression, in the study of life, or society, or history. I don't mean to say that the past is repeatable -- you can't go home again -- at least, you could go home, but it wouldn't be the same home, or you wouldn't be the same, which amounts to alienation in either case. No, the past isn't repeatable, but duration, for me, is not just a process by which things are created. It can also be a process by which they are destroyed.