Nobel Prize for Walmart

Guest Post by Steven Miller

Walmart deserves the Nobel Prize for economics!

Just consider what the giant retailer has accomplished. Walmart perfected a scientifically designed, electronically based “just-in-time” system of distribution that is maximally efficient in getting stuff to people. This is a tremendous world-historic achievement. Walmart has proven, once and for all, how simple and easy it is to distribute the basic necessities of life to everybody. Perhaps even for free!

Walmart has also become one of the 21^st Century’ greatest teachers. This too should be recognized! Economics these days have become increasingly arcane, maniacally focused on how to make maximum profits for corporations. Walmart has brought economic concepts out of the clouds and made them comprehensible for everyone. Economics is now something we all have basic life-experience with. Now we, the public, can recognize the tools of economics and learn to turn them to our own benefit.

At the same time, of course, Walmart is an odious construct. It abuses and exploits its workers, denies them economic rights, loots public money from every country, plays a fairly large role in the corporate destruction the planet, and it sells more guns directly to the public than any other commercial entity. These are open intentional predatory corporate policies that Walmart even brags about.

Thus arises what is perhaps the historic question that defines our Age: We all like the good stuff, so is the incredible destruction that Walmart produces, a necessary result of the technology or… does it emanate from the corporations that control it?

Everyone can now see that world ecological destruction comes not from a single corporation, but from a system that chooses only to use our wonderful technology for private corporate profits. They make choices in beyond public control that hurt us all. These choices are developed in secret behind corporate firewalls, justified as “private property” and “private profit” and removed from public control. Corporations even go so far as to tell us that fracking chemicals are “proprietary information” and therefor not our business! Thus corporations strive to seize and appropriate all human production away from human society and the very people who made this wealth.

So it’s not the technology that’s the fundamental problem. The negative aspects emanate from the corporate ownership.

Walmart is just a giant 99-cent store on steroids. The corporation receives massive tax subsidies and makes enormous profit, which is then removed from the public and hoarded in banks. Why not eliminate the middleman? Let’s keep the profits for the public and use the subsidies to support the full distribution of everything for free. After all, Walmart’s slogan is “Save money. Live better.” We should take them at their word.

More Teachings

When you walk into a Walmart there is… all this STUFF! Everybody knows that their stuff comes from factories all over the world. While millions of people engage in production, we can also see at Walmart that most of this stuff is machine-made, not made directly be people.

Walmart proves that production in today’s world is completely social. So if production is social, why is its distribution private? Walmart advocates, of course, that economic production should belong to private corporations.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall explains what a corporation is – and isn’t – in the 1819 Dartmouth College Case:

 “A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law. Being the mere creation of law, it possesses only those    properties, which the charter of its creation confers upon it…. Among the most          important are immortality, and, if the expression be allowed, individuality….”

So it is clear: a corporation is not an Act of God; it is not a law of nature. It is a legal construct – agreed to by people – that is empowered by law. It then appropriates social production privately and diverts the wealth that society produces together into the hands on a few.

Of course, Walmart’s legal counsel would respond to the court of the people that the corporation has incurred all the expenses to create this wonderful economic infrastructure for society. So therefore it should reap the profits in order to cover expenses and be rewarded for its contribution. What’s wrong with that?

Let’s examine this one.

Unearned Income and Tribute

One of the jobs of government is to create infrastructure. Infrastructure means systems like roads, airports, water pipes, sewers, ports, satellite communication systems, parks, beaches, scientific research, the Internet, health services, etc. These functions are expensive to establish, but, when finished, lower expenses for every individual. Once in place, infrastructure costs are simple maintenance and regular improvements. This is a perfect use for taxes. The public investment makes it up to everyone by providing services that make things easier. Throughout the 20^th Century generally it was the public that built the infrastructure.

What happens in the case of a toll road? Back in 1700s America, government would allow a corporation to form, with private investment money, with the goal of building a road – say, from Albany to Syracuse. Since this combination expended its funds, they were allowed to recoup them by putting a Toll Booth on the Highway. In addition, they were allowed to continue to charge to make a state-limited profit.

The fee you pay at the tollbooth is really a form of rent. Rent is a charge based on monopoly control. Rent, and its evil twin, financial interest, is established without doing any work at all. It is the result of a legal privilege that exists even when there is no cost of production at all. We all know that banks love to charge you for using a different debit card. There are no people involved who do any work on this. Everything is handled electronically. The same with the humungous “service charges” on bounced checks. This is rent. It is unearned income. It is a major source of profit for capitalism these days. It is theft.

Economist Michael Hudson explains:

       “… unearned income is getting money without working for it, getting money simply by lending money or by owning property and putting up a toll booth and  charging people an access price. So the economy is putting up tollbooths for education. If you want an education, you have to borrow from the bank. If you want to drive a car on a road, well, we’re putting up tollbooths on the roads; we’re turning the roads into toll roads. If you want to park your car, we’re now putting  parking meters on the sidewalks and the parking meters’ revenue’s sold off in Chicago to Wall Street for the next 30 or 40 years to get money to pay the interest to Wall Street now.” (1)

 As corporations merge ever more closely with the state, they are seizing control of every kind of infrastructure. President Obama has proposed turning all the publicly built infrastructure of the last 100 years into “public-private partnerships”, where the public supplies the money and the corporations retain the profits. The goal is to build a future where corporations control everything.

Having set up a valuable infrastructure, Walmart as a corporate entity or a corporate person contributes nothing to the process. All the work is actually done by Walmart workers who are considerably abused and exploited. In essence, what the corporation does is function like a tollbooth on the distribution system and demand rent as a monopoly. We simply pay for access. That is rent.

Walmart as an entity could easily be abolished without harming its distribution system in the slightest. The big lesson is that so could every corporation. This is the direct implication of John Marshall’s comment above. If a corporation is a legal fiction, rent is a legal fantasy that can be undone by the same process of public agreements that created it. So sorry, Walton Family billionaires, you do no work; you don’t get paid.

Move to Amend (www.movetoamend.org) is a national organization that is striving to amend the Constitution to clarify that corporations are not people and money is not speech. They sum it up nicely this way, “Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property. Corporate personhood is the legal fiction that property is a person.”

Rent is Metastasizing

Rent evolved beyond the toll road with the rise of the insurance industry. Once again, a corporation squats on the infrastructure and demands a tribute, a “profit”, for adding nothing, simply for allowing you the next step of access to what you need.

The next step was Cable TV. This monopoly claims to provide special services through wires, but they really just block you from accessing a program unless you go through them. Comcast claims monopoly control of an infrastructure and charge you rent for using their infrastructure.

The newest monopoly form of rent is being created right before our eyes – the Cloud. This newest form of electronic superstructure is based on distributing relative limited and stupid devices to the public, while keeping all the “intelligence” in centralized computers. Once again, you will pay rent for access for what you could get for free.

It gets worse. The World Economic Forum is an organization of the planet’s biggest capitalists. They hold a policy summit in Davos, Switzerland every year. These elite capitalists are well aware that capitalism is not sustainable and is beginning to devour its own base. Thus they are scheming up what they consider is a kinder, gentler version of private corporate property.

Out of this year’s profit fest, Frans Van Houten, CEO of Royal Philips, floated the ultimate extension of rent:

“Instead of selling products, businesses would retain ownership, selling the use of the goods they make as a service. Selling a product’s benefits instead of the product itself would create a powerful incentive for producers to design for longevity, repeated reuse, and eventual recycling, which would enable them to optimize their use of resources.”

Capitalism is already devouring public property and turning it into private corporate property. Now they are planning to do the same with the only other form of property there is – your personal property. Personal property is what a person actually uses individually on a daily basis. This can include a house, cars, computers, clothes etc. Van Houten’s idea is that all your personal property would be rented, not owned! Personal property would become corporate property.

The future is becoming clearer:  Either corporations will take control of everything in life, or the people will take over the corporations.

So let’s give Walmart the Nobel, recognize its historic achievements, and then take it over, in the name of the public, in order to serve the public. Those nice Walton folks can each keep one of their several estates to live in. But they will have to clean it themselves!

Notes

1) Michael Hudson: Trade Advantage Replaced by Rent Extraction. 18 Dec 2013. See his website: http://michael-hudson.com

2)  Frans van Houten. The Circular Revolution. January 20, 2014

Steven Miller

Oakland, California

Nanodog2@hotmail.com

photo credit: takomabibelot via photopin cc

Originally published in The Daily Censored

A Marxian Analysis of Information Technology

 

Guest post by Steven Miller and Satish Musunuru

 (Part 4 of a five-part series on the corporatization of Internet surveillance.)

Relations of Production

Since Bill Gates raised the question, what do communists have to say about turning the Internet into private property? Karl Marx showed how, in every society up to this point in time, the relations of production ultimately strangle the development of the means of production. This, he explained, must lead to a period of social revolution.

The means of production, or productive forces, refers to the tools and technology of human society, up to and including the human mind. The relations of production means the legally established social relations between people – how they interact and work together – that are ultimately determined by forms of property. For example, Americans consider Freedom of Speech perhaps their most important right – guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution. However, freedom of speech vanishes once you are on corporate property. Try telling the boss what you really think of him and you will see how far this right really goes.

That’s a relation of production. So are the minimum wage and the fact that women earn around 75% of what men do for the same job. All forms of discrimination and oppression pay off at the corporate bottom line.

Before the bourgeois revolution swept Europe in 1848, deposing almost all monarchies in its wake, a factory owner could hardly send his commodities down the river to market. Every minor princeling and self-proclaimed royal demanded the right to tax trade crossing their territory. This relation of production strangled the ability to sell products in order to realize capital and make private profit. Suddenly armies everywhere abolished this relation of production. In the same way, private property in digital technology deforms and shrivels the possibilities of the Internet.

“In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production….  At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution.”  (12)

Marx’s point is that the relations of production, fixed and frozen as private property by law, ultimately become antagonistic to the development of a technology that is highly fluid and increasingly more productive. This is an objective process, outside of our control, one that informs any subjective acts of insurrection. The relations of production under capitalism take myriad forms, but they ultimately come down to essential principles:

If you own the technology, you can appropriate all the production that people produce socially, today in an increasingly global system, by working with/for the technology. As private property, this production is yours to sell on the market for private profit. The necessities of life are distributed based on individual ability to pay for them. If you own little or nothing, you must sell your labor power to the owners of the technology in order to get money to survive.

None of these things have to be. We can imagine a different way to live. It was this basic human impulse that created the Internet.

A child can see the vast potential in digital technology. However, the “architecture of the system”, imposed by the outmoded relations of production of capitalism is definitely “in antagonism to” what a really developed Internet could be. These relations constantly “fetter” the development of computers and the Internet. If it doesn’t produce private property, it is discarded. Hence private Intranets determine how the code is configured. God doesn’t put all those ads on your screen, nor does he demand a tollbooth between you and the information you seek. Marx was prescient on this one.

Information objectively demands to be free. It is a social act, an activity; as communication, it demands consensus to establish meaning. This is a social relationship that is strangled by capitalist relations of production. Information is easy to collectivize and relatively hard to privatize.

Information is not the same thing as a tangible, material product, such as the latest Jordans or even an orange. I can transmit information to you without lessening my ability to control or use it. In Marxist terms, information has use value – you can use it how you will. With shoes, if I give them to you, I lose control. This objective nature of information constantly struggles against the capitalist demand that it become private property that they can sell for a profit. That is a fetter on technology.

Everyone knows that microelectronics constantly reduces exchange value – what you can sell it for. This flows from Moore’s Law – that the capacity of a computer chip doubles every 18 months, even as its value decreases. Exchange value tends toward zero to the extent that labor-less production is employed. This is because ever-decreasing amounts of human labor are involved. Long before Marx, Adam Smith, supposedly the high priest of capitalism, identified human labor power as the basis of all value. Labor-less production, the fastest growing type of production in the world today, is coming to pass with a vengeance. Production without labor necessarily demands distribution without money.

Attacks on net neutrality, filling your screen with commercial ads, various forms of corporate censorship, the domination of private search engines, the “Cloud” – all reflect the relations of production of capitalism. All serve to deform digital technology and subordinate it to the commercial interests of private corporations and the market.

Back in the Roman Empire, the hot new technology was the mule, the sterile offspring of a donkey and a horse. It was bigger and stronger than the donkey, and had far more stamina than the horse. The relations of production of slavery strangled this high tech development. Slaves could not personally sell the product of the mule, so when they took it out into the field, they beat it to death, “Hey Boss, you know how stubborn they are!”

But the thinking person, in antagonism to the relations of production of slavery, also understood that they could steal the mule, move three valleys away, and use this powerful new technology to feed their family and grow rich. Thus “begins the era of social revolution”. Since information and its technology objectively cannot be contained within the proscribed and narrow limits of private property, social revolution is already objectively going on. Today it is struggling into pass to our common subjective comprehension. The impulse to free information from corporate control gave birth to the Internet, open-source programming, Napster, jail-breaking your phone and the constant efforts to free digital technology for the 99%.

Background and Notes

12)  Karl Marx. Preface to The Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy. 1859

To be continued.

Reposted from Daily Censored

photo credit: Felix42 contra la censura via photopin cc

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Steven Miller has taught science for 25 years in Oakland’s Flatland high schools. He has been actively engaged in public school reform since the early 1990s. When the state seized control of Oakland public schools in 2003, they immediately implemented policies of corporatization and privatization that are advocated by the Broad Institute. Since that time Steve has written extensively against the privatization of public education, water and other public resources. You can email him at nanodog2@hotmail.com

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Satish Musunuru draws upon his training as an engineer and his experience as a professional in Silicon Valley to understand the relationship between technology and corporate capitalism and how it has brought us to the ecological and societal crisis we find ourselves in. You can email him at guruji323@hotmail.com

The Corporatization of the Internet

Guest post by Steven Miller and Satish Musunuru

(Part 3 of a five-part series about the corporatization of Internet surveillance.)

Bill Gates Dismisses Open Source Pioneers as Communists

From the beginning, Bill Gates argued that no public discussion of who controls the Internet should even be permitted. He famously called open-source pioneers  “new modern-day sort of communists”. (6)  Bill Clinton opined that corporations were the best way to develop the Internet. Al Gore and Gates re-defined the web as the “Information Super Highway”.

Of course, we know that super highways often have tollbooths, where you pay for the privilege of driving your car. Clinton began the massive wave of privatization, of both society in general and of the Internet in particular, that flourished under George W Bush and is expanding even more with Barack Obama. Clinton’s de-regulation of Wall Street set the stage for the looting of American by Wall Street banks, the 1% and their corporate attack dogs. Rajiv C. Shah & Jay P. Kesan amply describe this in “The Privatization of the Internet’s Backbone Network” (7)

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 deregulated the entire electromagnetic spectrum of the atomic vibrations we use for communication. This energy spectrum is as fundamental as the sun, but it was given away to corporations for chickenfeed. This was a huge step encouraging the privatization of Nature and natural processes.

Then the insurance model, essentially the cable-TV model, was imposed on the Internet: you pay a corporation for access to something that could easily be accessible for everyone for nothing. After all it’s simply a process of how you configure the software.

This massive centralization was clearly the exact opposite to the original intent of the Internet. The few massive super-corporations that already controlled the airwaves became ever more powerful. The great Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galeano stated, “Never have so many been held incommunicado by so few”. (8)

The essential structure of the Internet is simply written down as code. It can be designed to benefit the public, or it can be configured to benefit private profit. Larry Lessig explains:

“The architecture of the original Internet minimized the opportunity for control, and that environment of minimum control encouraged innovation…. At its birth, the Internet gave individuals great freedoms of speech and privacy.

“But the story about liberty on the original Net had a sequel: what the architecture could give, it could take away. The inability to control was not fixed in nature. It was a function of the architecture. And as that architecture changed, the ability to control would change as well…. Technologies were being deployed to better monitor and control behavior, with the consequence, for better or worse, of limiting the liberty of the space. As the architecture changed, the freedom of the space would change, and change it did.” (9)

Privatization is therefore not something that just happens. It is engineered. This goes deeper. These days, people like to imagine the Internet as a vast network, spanning the globe, where gigabytes of information send pictures and blogs around the world in microseconds. However, the Internet is dwarfed by a larger, and far more sinister system of networks, the Intranet. The Intranet is the collection of corporate and military networks that are protected from the public by firewalls. These have expanded again into extranets – including collaborators from other private concerns into shielded activities. Needless to say, individuals have no access to their computers, but corporations and the NSA have access to yours.

Dan Schiller described the formative role of the Internet’s evil twin – the Intranet – back in 1999:

“Corporate applications of Internet technology – intracorporate and business-to-business – comprise the true fulcrum of Internet system development. Corporate networks are the guiding hand of technical experimentation within cyberspace and comprise the leading site of its creative ferment. (emphases added)”   (10)

Fast forward to 2013 – the corporate control of digital technology today has a evolved far from the original vision of a vast global network where everything is open for everyone. We could have public servers at no cost – we have public airports and roads – but we don’t. Increasingly everything is in the Cloud, and corporations own and control the Cloud. Software components, like those Berners-Lee accessed for free, are now sold as apps. Corporations determine who can use them, for a price. Even if certain corporate products are free, it is largely because corporations stand to gain even more from the data they have about users using those products. Facebook is a good example here because while the social networking service is arguably free, the data that they collect and analyze on a daily basis is far more valuable.

Almost all of the data and intelligence reside on the cloud, which is a fancy way of saying massive data centers spread around the world, owned by massive corporations like Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft. etc. These data centers account for up to 10% of the worldwide usage of electricity.

The computers and cell phones we now use constantly reach out to the cloud for even the smallest of activities. When we speak into a cellphone and see our words appearing on the screen, what’s happening is that our voice is sent over to the cloud, where it gets converted into English language words, and then sent back to the phone. It takes only milliseconds to do this and is not easily visible to the user. The cloud stores every word we ever say to the phone at least for a period of time. Such a simple act of converting spoken words to written words can actually be done on the phone itself, if it had the program, but it has become cheaper and more advantageous for corporations to do it on the cloud.

A more recent evolution is the development of “computers” with greatly devolved capacity, really just shells of computers, with little storage and an always-on connection to the cloud. Unlike normal computers, these computers cannot function without the Internet. They are simply a window into the cloud. If you lose one of these “computers” you lose only the hardware and none of the data because everything is stored in the cloud, which is owned by these private corporations. This is cited as a convenience to consumers but, as we see with the NSA, it can be potentially dangerous to live life in the cloud. Facebook claims they own everything ever posted on their platform – photos, videos, writings, songs, you name it.

Microelectronics drives all this and is changing the nature of property. In the 16th Century most private property was in land; all of it was tangible. Today lots property is intangible, including things like software, algorithms, and ideas. But private property is still the divine right of thugs. Thanks to the Supreme Court, we understand these thugs are “corporate people”. So what kind of people are these?

The great book, The Corporation, points out that corporations exhibit characteristics of a very specific kind of person – namely psychopaths! (11)  Like psychopaths, corporations are grandiose, manipulative, both charming and deceptive, unable to feel remorse and always refuse to accept responsibility. So we happily trust all of our technology and most of our military to the tender mercies of… psychopaths. You know, nice people like Ted Bundy!

We can draw some conclusions here:

• As long as society allows the private ownership of information technology by corporations for profit, the unlimited positive potential of technology will be deformed to guarantee that profit, short-term, regardless of the long-term destruction of society and the planet.
• Corporations control the Surveillance State, not vice-versa.
• Corporations control every technology as private property. The sad lessons that Global Warming is trying to tell us, the utter corporate incompetence in the abuse of antibiotics, (just two examples!) shows that corporate control is inherently incompetent and short sighted.
• Therefore only the expansion of real public ownership and control of technology, at every level, in every branch of the economy, can release the wondrous potential of technology without abuse. The world of the very near future is going to be either all corporate, with no public, or all public, with no corporations. Which future it will be is up to us.

Background and Notes

7)  “The Privatization of the Internet’s Backbone Network” by  Rajiv C. Shah & Jay P. Kesan (http://www.governingwithcode.org/journal_articles/pdf/Backbone.pdf‎)

8) Zinn, Howard. A people’s history of the United States: 1492-present. 2003

8)  Lessig, op cit p 140

9)  Lessig, op cit, p 140

10)  Dan Schiller. Digital Capitalism. 1999, p 17

11)  Bakan. The Corporation – The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power. 2004. p 56  (You can also view the fine movie of the same name – on
DVD.)

 To be continued.

photo credit: Domain Barnyard via photopin cc

Reposted from Daily Censored

Steven Miller has taught science for 25 years in Oakland’s Flatland high schools. He has been actively engaged in public school reform since the early 1990s. When the state seized control of Oakland public schools in 2003, they immediately implemented policies of corporatization and privatization that are advocated by the Broad Institute. Since that time Steve has written extensively against the privatization of public education, water and other public resources. You can email him at nanodog2@hotmail.com

***

Satish Musunuru draws upon his training as an engineer and his experience as a professional in Silicon Valley to understand the relationship between technology and corporate capitalism and how it has brought us to the ecological and societal crisis we find ourselves in. You can email him at guruji323@hotmail.com