Human capital as financial instrument

From "The human capital strategy," by Morgan Adamson, Ephemera 9(4): 271-284.

Adamson writes about the ideological weight "huamn capital" carries as a concept.

In essence, the technology of human capital produces its object, human ability conceived of as a fixed form of capital, in order to measure it.

The qualitative nature of human experience and capabilities is flattened into something that can be quantified and captured by capital's investment schema.

Interesting:

Foucault explicitly examines the introduction of human capital into neo-liberal discourse in his lectures at the Collège de France in 1979 as that which transforms the classical function of labour and homo oeconomicus into an “entrepreneur of himself” (Foucault, 2008: 226).

This seems like the fundamental form of alienation under the regime of financial capitalism. Less jargony: a persuasive selling point for capitalism is the idea of investing in oneself, of growing one's identity/subjectivity by using the analytical tools of capitalism, by collaborating with capitalism's ordering and taxonomizing schemes. We buy into the idea that the purpose of life is to grow ourselves like a business, rather than to merely live.

Adamson sketches the insidious development of instruments for investing in the income stream a person will produce in the future -- to buy an equity slice of a person in a modernized version of indentured servitude.

it is not merely the products of intellectual labour that are to be traded; rather, it is private rights to the actual “acquired useful abilities” of the population that constitute the commodity of human capital markets. Emerging markets in human capital are symptomatic of a tendency towards forms of exploitation of human life that are both innovative and anachronistic, in that they deploy long-standing forms of exploitation through new financial technologies.

Just imagine the derivative possibilities -- collateralized-labor obligations, with tranches of souls to match Huxley's vision in Brave New World.

Adamson points out that elaborating the concept of human capital leads inevitably to speculation in it -- that is why the concept is developed; it is a form of innovation allowing for new ways to invest idle capital for a promised return.

Hedonism and revolution

Re "Living labour and the labour of living," by Darko Suvin. Critical Quarterly 46.1.

Suvin advocates an Epicurian "swerve" into hedonism, a sort of update of Marcuse circa Eros and Civilization.

We typically think of hedonism in terms of excess, but that is a distortion that suits a social system that relies on alienated labor. We reject hedonism and pursue workaholism. Glossing Epicurus, Suvin makes the point that with hedonism, the body itself sets limits, whereas there are no limits with capitalist greed. As Aristotle noted, "There is no limit to the aim of money-making." Hedonism hence has the potential to demarcate a natural limit to the scope of production. ("To each according to his need.)

David Harvey, in his course on Marx's Capital, makes a point of highlighting how Marx uses this idea to argue that competition in capitalism drives capitalists to strive for endless accumulation. Capital, by definition, is never enough; always depreciating, never safe. Capitalism therefore requires creative destruction, instability, recurring crises, to facilitate the constant striving.

Styles of consumption vs. specific tastes

From Douglas Holt, "Distinction in America? Recovering Bourdieu's theory of tastes from its critics"

In these instances, class boundaries are formed only to the extent that there exist social interactional processes through which otherwise incommensurate field-specific cultural capitals are aggregated into meta-field attributions of status. For example, does one, as a nonparticipant in the consumption field of leisure reading, acknowledge and grant status to friends and acquaintances who have highly developed tastes for prose? I believe that this conversion of field-specific to abstracted cultural capital - while a problematic iterative process - is a pervasive feature of contemporary social interaction. People constantly make such judgments to assess their affinities with others' tastes in the process of choosing friends, lovers, and business acquaintances. If this process is significant, it suggests that in an increasingly fragmented cultural world, status judgments based on shared interests are less important than those based upon similar styles of consuming, which can be applied to any cultural category.

An alternative to the hierarchies within hierarchies idea -- or perhaps a reference to the code which transcends local hierarchies and makes them commensurable. Styles of consumption -- the form of distinction -- are more significant than what is specifically consumed. Those meanings are transient and contingent, fashion changes them all the time. What doesn't change is the mastery of how fashion changes, being able to anticipate it or even guide it. The struggle within consumption is to be a tastemaker and the specific tastes involved are irrelevant, ultimately arbitrary. Thus you can never be dethroned by a series of bad recommendations.

Work ethic as ideology

From Stanley Aronowitz "Why Work?" Chapter 7 of Politics of Identity:

He wants "to suggest a campaign to reduce work on social and ideological grounds," as a way of counteracting degraded form of compulsory labor under capitalism. Since productivity enhancements have to some degree eliminated the possibility of worker autonomy within the work world, and the prevailing ideology of consumerism has helped make leisure the more pressing and meaningful engagement in everyday life, the workplace is mainly a place where domination is established and reproduced -- not a place where skills are learned, social ties are developed and species being is expressed. Work could be severed from income and have meaning thereby restored to it -- "Work is that human activity which expresses creative achievement and corresponds, therefore, to part of desire, our will to objectivate ourselves individually and collectively by creating objects or social relations." But capital needs to be able to compel low-wage workers to sweat. Society is held together, as Marcuse argued, surplus repression derived from compulsory work -- if we all got to do our own thing, it would be anarchy. So we work not because it produces useful stuff, but because it disciplines us to the existing order. To "civilization," as Freud would have it.

But there are pockets of resistance to administered consumerism: Aronowitz cites the example of furloughed longshoremen. They demonstrate

that the shift from production to consumption as the locus of everyday life is by no means automatic when "free" time dominates "necessary" labor time. When the workplace and the neighborhood are spatially contiguous and workers have succeeded in preserving an institutional equivalent of the shop floor to provide for the basis for their social interaction, consumerism is relegated to a subordinate place in their everyday experience.

Suburbanization and commuting, etc., all serve to destroy that work-life integrity, and make work time seem "unreal" and dead and leisure time seem the time for identity forging.

The classic model of contemporary mass society is provided by the suburban or exurban location of industrial and commercial working spaces. The horizontal patterns of home construction produce low density living arrangements. Hence the nuclear family, the shopping center, the mass media constitute the nexus of social relationships that often effectively counterveil the collective tasks performed at the workplace.

So much for the "general intellect"? Aronowitz's analysis sounds a lot like what I grew up with in a 1980s exurb. Work was a drag, consumption dictated identity, and life was a struggle to find ways to connect meaningfully with peers and to escape the isolation of family. WE face "the crisis in leisure -- the effort of people to regain their sense of craft, and liberate themselves from their complete dependence on the wage relation for personal and social meaning."

The question then is whether the networked society has upended that isolation-meaningless-work-consumerism balance. Can we upset the crisis of leisure through immaterial labor -- or is immaterial labor a further alienation?

The underlying logic: capitalist management techniques make work empty "unwork", but capitalism produces enough goods to make consumerism appear to compensate for the emptiness. But we will only accept consumerism (promoted by mass media and by insecurity about social belonging) if we are unnaturally isolated from our natural companions in society, those who we would have formed solidarity with in the workplace.

Indeed, millions still seek jobs, but only to earn a living. Few jobs still carry with them the idea of a vocation such as is usually associated with professions or genuine crafts (neither of which correspond to their contemporary practices). Even much industrial labor of the past -- mining for example -- was closely linked with work cultures that far overshadowed the semi-skilled character of the work itself. The sense of vocation experienced by workers in retail trades or civil trades (two of the most important service sectors) was long eclipsed by the advent of corporate selling

Work used to provide a culture and a sense of belonging. It meant something to be a steelworker, etc. This is why lost working class culture gets sentimentalized, and rendered nostalgically. But it doesn't exist anymore; only the mass monoculture that the Frankfurt school lamented -- or is that monoculture being fractured by network culture and its alleged niches?

Aronowitz cites Baudrillard argument about the end of politics: "The family cannot be said to form an alternate cultural sphere capable of resistance.... Privatization is not only a rebellion against being represented by the political. According to Baudrillard in his In the Shadow of Silent Majorities, it signifies the end of the social." The masses are neither subject nor object but are "now purely a series of signifiers, their representation entirely simulated." Here we arrive at why networked sociality is not a solution to the atomization problem but is instead its apotheosis. It materializes the notion that we are a series of signifiers articulated serially in prescribed, administered commercial spaces.

Basically this is the all-important question: post Facebook, do we now more than ever live in a world in which "friendship and community-making have become as rare talents as good cabinet-making" as Aronowitz puts it? Or has social network worsened the erosion of those skills that work microcultures once nurtured? Can we stop instrumentalizing work to rediscover the real work of reforging the general intellect, only outside the work world subsumed by capital? Facebook of course is completely subsumed. Must discard Facebook and meet face to face, to rid ourselves of partial mediated, partially administered sociality and compulsory sharing as immaterial labor, and recapture the social, the fulfilling work of making friends and communities.

The end of working-class culture

From an essay by Barbara and John Ehrenreich, in Between Labor and Capital

The accumulation and concentration of capital which occurred in the last decades of the 19th century allowed for an extensive reorganization of working-class life -- both in the community and in the workplace. This reorganization was aimed at both social control and the development of a mass consumer market. The net effect of this drive to reorganize and reshape working-class life with the social atomization of the working class: the fragmentation of work (and workers) in the productive process, a withdrawal of aspirations from the workplace into private goals, the disruption of indigenous networks of support and mutual aid, the destruction of autonomous working-class culture and its replacement by "mass culture" defined by the privatized consumption of commodities (health care, recreation, etc.)

The most fiendish aspect of this process was its retrospective invisibility.

Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, etc. from Wealth of Networks

From Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, ch. 4:

Where extrinsic rewards dominate, this will increase the activity rewarded as usually predicted in economics. However, the effect on intrinsic motivation, at least sometimes, operates in the opposite direction. Where intrinsic motivation is an important factor because pricing and contracting are difficult to achieve, or because the payment that can be offered is relatively low, the aggregate effect may be negative. Persuading experienced employees to communicate their tacit knowledge to the teams they work
with is a good example of the type of behavior that is very hard to specify for efficient pricing, and therefore occurs more effectively through social motivations for teamwork than through payments. Negative effects of small payments on participation in work that was otherwise volunteer-based are an example of low payments recruiting relatively few people, but making others shift their efforts elsewhere and thereby reducing, rather than increasing, the total level of volunteering for the job.

Extrinsic motivations make intrinsic motivations seem inauthentic, inadequate. We suddenly feel stupid for doing something for free once we see that payment is possible. Also, paying a little exposes the bad faith of the volunteer contract. Paying a little implies that the social rewards heretofore being offered are worth even less -- payment discredits them.

The larger issue here is that motivation is not something that emerges strictly from individuals, but is instead generated by context, by a system that makes it appear in different forms to individuals. Our impulses to act are shaped by the context in which they are expressed. Also we don't prefer stasis and require pecuniary incentives to act. Rather we want to act, and we ask society to provide to us forms or fields or modes in which to do so. The key question is what shapes those forms -- market capitalism demands a certain regime for social action, a certain set of congenial explanations. A postcapitalist society would need different explanations, a different set of ex post fact explanations for why people become motivated.

Are there only two forms of motivation: for money and for social recognition? Are they reducible to only the latter?

for any given culture, there will be some acts that a person would prefer to perform not for money, but for social standing, recognition, and probably, ultimately, instrumental value obtainable only if that person has performed the action through a social, rather than a market, transaction.

Another way of putting that: some desires are inherently social -- we have to see ourselves as part of a group to conceive them and fulfill them. They don't register to us as individuals, or when we are locked into thinking of ourselves as isolated. Markets tend to project identity as entirely individualized -- we want things for ourselves only. But some of the things we want are to belong and to share. We want a group-based identity to complement the atomized identity.

According to Benkler, these are the conditions for peer production: (1) means of production not serving as capital. People own means of production not as an investment to capitalize by merely as part of everyday life. The personal computer fits here. (2) Information as the raw material of production processes must be freely accessible as part of a commons. The open internet currently fits here. (3) "Modular" production processes that require no coordination to yield useful results. Seems that the key here is redefining what a useful result or finished good is. Rather than something that can be marketed, it is something that can be "remixed" in a subsequent information-based production process. In other words, in the networked-information economy, all goods are intermediate and there are no finished goods to be fetishized/mystified as capitalist commodities.

The theft of friendship

More from chapter 2 of The Politics of Identity, by Stanely Aronowitz. The connection of what he is writing about to "identity politics" is a bit obscure, but it boils down to the question of whether the working class has sufficient subjectivity as a class to lead the revolution, or whether the revolution will occur regardless of class consciousness thanks to the inherent contradictions of accumulation -- i.e. capital will run out of labor to exploit, or ways to squeeze labor with the machines that deprive them of the subjectivity necessary to complain about their fate. Capital "subsumes" labor and deprives it of a standpoint from which to critique its position, as capital determines labor conscoiusness as a natural fact, a reified, given thing. (This apparently is derived from Lukacs and History and Class Consciousness.

Identity politics, if I get what Aronowitz is saying, is a reflection of capital's subsumption of labor and social institutions and so on. "Management is a technological expression of the logic of domination, a means of creating a closed universe such that contradictions, far from disappearing, take the form of the appearance of 'social problems' subject to manipulation by social policy.... Capital successfully transforms 'alienation' into a social neurosis that becomes the property of an individual who is now called 'deviant' from the social norm of integration and subordination." In other words, alienation becomes a personal-identity problem, to be solved through psychological corrections and adjustments, not through collective action.

I was struck by this sentence: "Just as property is the theft of the labor of the immediate producer in the transition from feudalism to capitalism, so technology is the theft of the artisan's craft in the transition from the formal to the real subsumption of labor under capital." It seems as though this could be extended to cover a more recent transformation, a new dimension (enabled by networking technology) of the logic of capital: the subsumption of immaterial labor under capital, which plays out as the theft of friendship. Our social behavior is taken away from us, in the sense that it is turned to account by capital.